#Artists (visual or written) spend hours and hours creating something and ask for just a few seconds of someone's time.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Normal Bookclub Activites <3

@moonlitpeony and i made a pin the head on the nie mingjue for our mdzs book club 🥳

(we used @poorly-drawn-mdzs’s design! (their comics are sent in our book club’s group chat every week and they’re our favorite :))

[perpetual-stories]

How To Fight Writers Block

hello, hello. hope everyone is doing well. as you can all tell, this post will be about how to fight writers block.

it’s really annoying to me when I hear people say “oh you don’t have writers block, you’re just lazy.”

first of all, yes, I am naturally lazy. second of all, how dare you. writing isn’t as easy as many think. granted, all you have to do is write down words on paper, but it’s not always easy to find the right words to express what you are feeling, or what you wish to say.

I have had terrible writer’s block for the last few days and it’s horrible! as a business owner or a small writing store, I have to be ready to write and fulfill my clients’ ideas and orders.

it’s not easy. It takes a heavy toll on my imagination, and digs me a deep pit of blockage, drowning in the lack of originality because of the constant writing and repetition or certain phrases and sentences in different projects.

i am making this post in the hopes to remind myself about over coming the dreaded and sometimes skeptically believed writer’s block.

What is writer’s block?

Yeah, I know. We all know what that is, but let me define it.

is the state of being unable to proceed with writing, and/or the inability to start writing something new

some people believe it to be a real problem, others believe it's “all in your head”

What Causes Writer’s Block?

in the 1970s, clinical psychologists Jerome Singer and Michael Barrios decided to find out

they concluded that there are four broad causes of writer's block:

Excessively harsh self-criticism

Fear of comparison to other writers

Lack of external motivation, like attention and praise

Lack of internal motivation, like the desire to tell one's story

How to overcome writer's block: 20 tips

1. Develop a writing routine:

Author and artist Twyla Tharp once wrote: “Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is a result of good work habits.”

it might seem counterintuitive

if you only write when you “feel creative,” you're bound to get stuck in a tar pit of writer's block

The only way to push through is by disciplining yourself to write on a regular schedule. It might be every day, every other day, or just on weekends — but whatever it is, stick to it!

2. Use "imperfect" words:

A writer can spend hours looking for the perfect word or phrase to illustrate a concept

You can avoid this fruitless endeavor by putting, “In other words…” and simply writing what you’re thinking, whether it’s eloquent or not

You can then come back and refine it later by doing a CTRL+F search for “in other words.”

3. Do non-writing activities:

one of the best ways to climb out of a writing funk is to take yourself out of your own work and into someone else’s

Go to an exhibition, to the cinema, to a play, a gig, eat a delicious meal

immerse yourself in great STUFF and get your synapses crackling in a different way

Snippets of conversations, sounds, colors, sensations will creep into the space that once felt empty

4. Freewrite through it:

free-writing involves writing for a pre-set amount of time without pause — and without regard for grammar, spelling, or topic. You just write.

The goal of freewriting is to write without second-guessing yourself — free from doubt, apathy, or self-consciousness, all of which contribute to writer's block. Here’s how:

Find the right surroundings. Go somewhere you won't be disturbed.

Pick your writing utensils. Will you type at your computer, or write with pen and paper? (Tip: if you're prone to hitting the backspace button, you should freewrite the old-fashioned way!)

Settle on a time-limit. Your first time around, set your timer for just 10 minutes to get the feel for it. You can gradually increase this interval as you grow more comfortable with freewriting.

5. Relax on your first draft:

Many writers suffer form perfectionism, which is especially debilitating during a first draft

“Blocks often occur because writers put a lot of pressure on themselves to sound ‘right’ the first time. A good way to loosen up and have fun again in a draft is to give yourself permission to write imperfectly.” — editor Lauren Hughes

perfect is the enemy of good,” so don't agonize about getting it exactly right! You can always go back and edit, maybe even get a second pair of eyes on the manuscript

6. Don’t start at the beginning:

the most intimidating part of writing is the start, when you have a whole empty book to fill with coherent words

instead of starting with the chronological beginning of whatever it is you’re trying to write, dive into middle, or wherever you feel confident

7. Take a shower:

Have you ever noticed that the best ideas tend to arrive while in the shower, or while doing other “mindless” tasks?

research shows that when you’re doing something monotonous (such as showering, walking, or cleaning), your brain goes on autopilot, leaving your unconscious free to wander without logic-driven restrictions

showering is my favourite thing to do if I may add

8. Balance your inner critic:

successful writers have in common is the ability to hear their inner critic, respectfully acknowledge its points, and move forward

You don't need to completely ignore that critical voice, nor should you cower before it

you must establish a respectful, balanced relationship, so you can address what's necessary and skip over what's insecure and irrelevant

9. Switch up your tool:

a change of scenery can really help with writer's block. However, that scenery doesn't have to be your physical location — changing up your writing tool can be just as big a help!

if you’ve been typing on your word processor of choice, try switching to pen and paper. Or if you're just sick of Google Docs, consider using specialized novel writing software.

10. Change your POV:

great advice from editor Lauren Hughes: “When blocked, try to see your story from another perspective ‘in the room’ to help yourself move beyond the block. How might a minor character narrate the scene if they were witnessing it? A ‘fly on the wall’ or another inanimate object?

11. Exercise your creative muscles:

Any skill requires practice if you want to improve, and writing is no different! So if you’re feeling stuck, perhaps it’s time for a strengthening scribble-session to bolster your abilities

12. Map out your story:

If your story has stopped chugging along, help it pick up steam by taking a more structured approach — specifically, by writing an outline

13. Write something else:

Though it's important to try and push through writer's block with what you're actually working on, sometimes it's simply impossible

feel free to push your current piece to the side for now and write something new

14. Work on your characters:

It follows that if your characters are not clearly defined, you’re more likely to run into writer’s block

15. Stop writing for readers:

write for yourself, not your potential readers

this will help you reclaim the joy of being creative and get you back in touch with what matters: the story.

this is something I really need to do. because of my etsy business i don't write for fun anymore, but instead as a business and a deadline. i'm going to have to pull out my old crappy wattled fanfics or write some new ones.

16. Try a more visual process:

when words fail you, forget them and get visual. Create mind maps, drawings, Lego structures — ideally related to your story, but whatever unblocks your mind!

17. Look for the root of it:

writer’s block often comes from a problem deeper than simple “lack of inspiration.” So let's dig deep: why are you really blocked? Ask yourself the following questions:

Do I feel pressure to succeed and/or competition with other writers?

Have I lost sight of what my story is about, or interest in where it's going?

Do I lack confidence in my own abilities, even if I've written plenty before?

Have I not written for so long that I feel intimidated by the mere act?

Am I simply feeling tired and run-down?

once you identify what's wrong, it'll be so much easier to fix.

18. Quit the Internet:

If willpower isn’t your strong suit and your biggest challenge is staying focused, try a site blocker like Freedom or an app like Cold Turkey

19. Let the words find you:

meditate, go for a walk, take that shower

Word Palette is a great app that features a keyboard of random words, allowing you to simply click your way to your next masterpiece.

You can also try AI auto-completers like Talk to Transformer, where you can enter a phrase and let the app “guess what comes next.”

even though they often produce nonsense, it's a great way to help that writer's block.

20. Write like Hemingway:

And if your biggest block is your own self-doubt about your prose, Hemingway offers suggestions to improve your writing as you go

it's a pretty cool app if you ask me.

it highlights your sentences (if need be) and makes suggestions on how to improve them!

well, there you have it! a lengthy post on how to fight writer's block. now i just hope i can combat my own soon.

like, comment and reblog if you find this useful! feel free to reblog in instagram and tag me perpetualstories

Follow me on instagram and tumblr for more writing and grammar tips and more!

[x--daughters-of-darkness--x]

To Make A Hero – Maria Brink and Andy Biersack ‘Dark Nights: Death Metal’ Interview

Countless iterations of Batman have been created since the character’s DC Comics debut in 1939. He’s been a detective, a Dark Knight and a key member of The Justice League. Of course, the crime-fighting anti-hero also leapt off the page and onto the screen for TV shows and movies such as the 1960s Batman live action TV show, the 1990s Batman: The Animated Series, and even a 2018 Batman Ninja animated film. Now, fans can see — and hear — their favorite action hero in a completely new way with Dark Nights: Death Metal motion-comic series and soundtrack.

The multi-medium endeavor is based on the comic book mini series of the same name written by Scott Snyder and illustrated by Greg Capullo. The official soundtrack was produced by Tyler Bates (Guardians of the Galaxy, Watchmen), who recruited over a dozen musical artists to contribute to the songs. Two such artists are Andy Biersack (Black Veil Brides) and Maria Brink (In This Moment), who came together for the song “Meet Me In The Fire.” Both Biersack and Brink also have speaking roles in the motion-comic.

“I got a call saying that they were doing this series,” Biersack recalls, “and asked if I wanted to do the voice of Batman. For me, not only was it a dream come true, but it was huge to have a creative outlet in a time where there was nothing that could be done.”

Biersack is, of course, referring to the COVID-19 pandemic that kept non-essential workers home for months on end.

“It was this weird period where we couldn’t do anything creative. So to be able to, in some cases, record the audio here in my home studio and pretend to be Batman for a few hours a day was awesome.”

Biersack’s undying love for the anti-hero is well-established, but In This Moment vocalist Maria Brink also professes to adore comic books.

“I’ve always loved them and been fascinated by them,” she says. “I actually got into them more when I was older ⁠— I like all fantasy stuff. I got to have the voice of The Hand, which was so cool. In the middle of COVID, all of us were looking for creative outlets to keep our minds occupied, so it felt like a blessing for sure. To me what was so exciting was to bring in all the musicians and have all of their voices taking on this new storyline. I really loved the creativeness of converging both of these worlds.”

The storyline of the mini series is based on the concept of a dark multiverse, which sees multiple alternate realities and alternative versions of Batman. Told through visuals, dialogue, and music, this project is complex in both content and form.

“What I really liked about this project,” Biersack continues, “is that you have an opportunity to see those iterations individually and how they play into the same storyline. To have every version that you love in the same story is a pretty exciting thing. Especially if you watch the series that they made, you get to see the whole history of this character.”

For the Black Veil Brides frontman, it speaks to the greatness, versatility and longevity of Batman as a whole.

“As someone who enjoys comic book character creating and world-building, I love the idea of having a character that can stand the test of 80 years and have all of these variations, and the validity of one is the same as the other. You can have the Adam West chummy, joke-y Batman and you can have the Frank Miller angry, grumpy, murderous Batman — and they’re both valid versions of the character.”

For Brink, collaborating with Biersack and producer Tyler Bates on their cinematic track “Meet Me In The Fire” was about much more than Batman.

“When I was writing it,” she explains, “I wasn’t just thinking about it in terms of the comic book,  but the world in general. That give and take, the struggle, the fight and the power; people wanting to stand with each other and having to go through hard times together — especially where we were all kind of at [with COVID] when we were writing this song. There’s gonna be hard times and you might have to walk through some flames and get your feet burnt.”

Biersack adds, “The idea of Batman, or any character, is there’s some initial injustice that causes them to become the hero that they ultimately become. In those ways, there’s so many parallels to the idea of those moments of absolute darkness or sadness that we all face. And in a year where not only was the world changing on a literal level — a virus that’s traveling everywhere and putting people in danger — but also socially, there were so many changes and important things that occurred last year. The best value that you can have in life is to not just have something difficult to occur, but to learn from it and grow from it.”

So in a time when lives are literally on the line every day, how do these two prominent rock musicians define what it truly means to be a hero?

“I guess a hero to me is someone who really stands up for others,” Brink says. “Someone who really cares about other people and who will risk themselves and whatever it takes to empower other people. It’s selfless. The doctors risking their lives to help these sick people — they’re heroes. They could die.”

“Also just on a more personal level,” Biersack adds, “anybody in your life who inspires you to be a better version of yourself is tremendously heroic. I think if you can find it in yourself to be a hero for yourself and for everyone around you, that is the most important virtue possible. If you aren’t trying your best to be better than you were yesterday, ultimately I don’t know that you’re spending your time that wisely.

“I think at the end of the day,” he continues, “the message that rock n’ roll has always been about is to not put everyone else up on that pedestal. Rise to the challenge yourself and be the hero that you want to see.”

You can catch Black Veil Brides and In This Moment on tour with Ded and Raven Black on their North American The In Between Tour starting Sept. 17.

[allsassnoclass]

Prompt: 28, 10 and Lashton

You said lashton in an art gallery.  I said Off-Screen circa 2017 (aka Luke’s Utah Era).  this might feel a little out of context, because it is. the theoretical prequel that I'm writing would explain more of the surrounding circumstance, but the most important thing to note is that Luke moved in with Ashton in Utah after the end of the SLFL tour.  This takes place in January of 2017.

lashton: “Where are all of my hoodies? Did you borrow literally every single one of my hoodies?” + art gallery

The last guest has left when Luke arrives, the gallery technically beginning to close for the night.  Ashton is tired, all of the frantic energy from the past few months building up to this evening of schmoozing and revealing the deepest parts of his soul to be judged by the art community, and he feels empty now that it has passed.  There’s a glass of some sort of fancy alcohol in his hand, but he hasn’t had the chance to drink it all night, and his suit feels like it doesn’t fit his shoulders correctly.  It’s been bothering him, but he’s been too focused on smiling genially and making nice with every single person who passed through the doors to look at his art to do anything about it.

The sound of the main doors opening is loud in the quiet of the space, and Ashton tenses where he’s talking to the owner of the gallery.  He relaxes once he sees that it’s not another art snob or a random person who got lost, but Luke.  He stands at the threshold awkwardly, fiddling with the hem of one of Ashton’s college hoodies, beanie stuffed unceremoniously over his hair.  It’s getting longer, and he’s been letting it curl more instead of spending hours styling it and trying to get it to sit right.

He looks just as breathtaking as ever, and Ashton is almost overwhelmed with how lucky he feels to be one of the only people to see famous rockstar Luke Hemmings with his guard completely down.

“Luke,” he sighs, relief too obvious.  Luke just smiles and wanders, stopping short when something in a painting catches his eye.

“Friend of yours?” the gallery owner asks, and Ashton turns his attention back to her.  It’s too easy to forget that anyone else exists the moment Luke enters a room.  Ashton needs to get a grip.

“Yeah, that’s my housemate.  Do you mind if we look around for a bit?  He couldn’t make the normal gallery times.”

He logistically could have, because Luke doesn’t have responsibilities here in Utah, but Ashton knows that the idea of him having to look nice, be in a crowd of people, and possibly be recognized almost sent him into a panic attack.

“Sure.  I’m locking up by 10, though, so be out before then.”

Ashton thanks her profusely, and the look she gives him is a bit too knowing for his taste.  Still, she heads towards the back with an artistic grace, and Ashton joins Luke where he’s staring at one of Ashton’s paintings.

“Hi,” he says quietly.  Luke leans into him in a practiced move, shoulders brushing together.  Luke has always been familiar and comfortable, despite how little they see each other.

Ashton knows he should feel bad that Luke felt so lost in LA that he had to come all the way to Utah and Ashton to try and find himself, but selfishly he’s glad.  For a few months, he gets Luke to himself, curled up on his couch and eating at his kitchen island instead of off traveling the world and meeting adoring fans.  Besides, having Luke here helps.  Ashton can’t take care of another person if he’s drunk every night, and meals are easier to prepare when there are two people to eat them.  It’s easier to fall asleep if someone else is breathing slowly next to him.  It’s easier to keep the loneliness at bay with Luke stepping into the gaps in his life.

“Was it a good showing?” Luke asks.

“It was,” he replies, resisting the urge to do something inappropriate like pull Luke closer and tuck his face into his neck just to breathe him in.  “I even sold a few paintings.”

“You did?” Luke lights up.  “Ashton, that’s amazing!  Which ones?  Wait, I want to see them all anyway.  Walk me through them as we go.”

Ashton does, trying his best to remember the thought process and inspiration behind each of the paintings hanging in the gallery.  For the earlier works it’s easier, because objects inside are more defined and they have clearer stories.  For recent creations featuring bold strokes and swirls of color and more ambiguous shapes, the inspirations shift towards ideas.  Some of them he created while drunk, and he has to check the title cards to figure out what he was going for, because while drunk Ashton isn’t good for much, he at least always writes titles in his notes app when he paints.

His professors made him include some of those works, saying that a few are profound and mesmerizing and probably your best work.  It makes Ashton feel like he can’t create anything if he doesn’t have a few drinks in him.  It’s a mindset he’s trying to move away from, but it’s hard.  At least he has endless inspiration with Luke in the house.

Luke looks at a piece entitled Longing for a few minutes, and Ashton prays that he doesn’t ask who or what he was longing for while painting it.

“Come on,” he says when the swirl of blues and purples (with just that shimmer of gold to represent the person of desire, possibly forming a hazy constellation of Luke to anyone who knows what to look for) becomes too much.  “I want to show you the synesthesia section.”

“Section” is a generous term, because it’s actually just four paintings on the same wall.  He has many more paintings for various songs and albums back home, most of them on smaller canvases he can get from the craft store, but there are a few songs that evoke such strong, beautiful visuals that he had to paint them properly.

The first painting has a primarily blue background, mixing with black in short strokes by the edges.  Traveling diagonally across the canvas are an assortment of other colors, mostly yellows and reds until they meet strokes of white in the middle.  The paint is thick, creating textured mountains where the colors meet, and that’s Ashton’s favorite part about painting, really.  He’s not very good at 3D forms, but paint never lays completely flat.  He likes how dynamic it is because of it.

“Gravity,” Luke croons as he looks, “is working against me.”

Ashton loves hearing him sing.  He was worried for those first few weeks Luke came to him, because he rarely heard it, but now he can count on random melodies filling the house at all hours.

“John Mayer makes nice songs to look at,” he says.  Luke smiles at him, then they move on to the next one.

This painting has a bit more variety in color.  Ashton remembers mixing them on his pallet, unbothered by the streaks it caused in the brush strokes, knowing that it was necessary to capture what the song makes him see.  A dark background gives way to a curve of reds, purples, pinks, blues, ending in some greens and yellows and a hint of orange.  He splattered white and black on afterwards, just a little bit near the middle of the curve, and Luke leans forward to see all the small dots.

“This one really does look like ‘Karma Police,’” Luke says.  “Even I can see it.”  He straightens and gives Ashton another grin, and he knows that he can’t capture that smile in a painting (he’s tried, so many times), but he still wants to attempt it again.

“I can’t believe how talented you are,” Luke says.  “It’s almost unfair.”

“Thanks,” he says, ducking his head.  Luke nudges him with his elbow and moves on to the next painting.  This one follows a similar pattern to the other two, a dark background with color in the middle, but it’s messier.  Blue and purple feature the most, but there are hints of orange and yellow, and white overtakes the painting in peaked chunks and thin streaks.

“You’d think that for a Prince song, there’d be a bit more purple,” Luke says, tilting his head.

“Maybe he should have written more purple songs, then,” Ashton shrugs.  “‘Joy in Repetition’ has more blue.”

“Wait, is “Purple Rain” even purple?” Luke asks, alarmed.

“Yes, that one fits the title.”  Luke looks reassured at that, and they continue to the last painting.  Ashton feels nerves clench in his stomach.

He didn’t submit any of his photographs or colored pencil sketches of Luke, not even the really good one of Luke sleeping in his bed with an arm over his face that Ashton drew one night when the insomnia was hitting him hard, but this painting could be just as damning.  It’s different from the other three because it’s slightly bigger and oriented differently, vertical instead of horizontal.  The background is also based in white instead of black, primarily creating a pale blue to match the cautious optimism of the song.  More blue meets with seafoam green, peach, and white in the middle, dripping down the canvas until all the colors fade into just the green.  The lines of this one are smoother, blended together evenly, but there are bursts of gold in the middle and near a few edges that he bought a specific brand of metallic paint for.  Ashton watches as Luke’s eyes trace the painting before he turns to the name card.

“Luke?” he asks when a few moments have gone by with him completely frozen.

“Really?” Luke asks, voice cracking.  “This is what you see?”

“Yeah,” Ashton says.  He knew he was going to end up painting the song as soon as he first heard Luke’s voice singing about tasting the ocean.  “It’s mostly “Outer Space,” but I incorporated some of what I saw for “Carry On” at the bottom.”

“Oh,” Luke says, then turns and tucks himself into a hug, squeezing Ashton tight enough that he feels short of breath.  Ashton wraps his arms around his shoulders, pulling him closer and letting Luke cuddle into him in a way that he’s almost getting too big for.

“I take it you like it?” he asks, just to be sure.  Luke nods, and when he does finally pull away he swipes at his eyes with the sleeve of Ashton’s sweatshirt.

“Can I buy it?” he asks.

“Luke, you can have it for free.”  Luke shakes his head vigorously.

“No, you’ve already given me too much.  I want to buy it from you.  You should be paid for your art.”

“Okay,” Ashton says quietly.  Luke’s eyes are still fixed on the painting, and Ashton comes back to slide a hand around his waist again.  “We can negotiate a price later.”  He presses a kiss to Luke’s temple, because that’s something he can get away with still.

“Don’t try to give me a discount.  I’ve already stolen your food and half your clothes.”

“Speaking of,” Ashon says, “I’m absolutely positive that this hoodie was the last one in my closet.  Where are all my hoodies?  Did you borrow literally every single one of my hoodies?”

“Yeah,” Luke says sheepishly.  “They’re comfortable.  They smell like you.”

Luke is going to kill him like this.  Ashton can’t even be upset, because what a way to go, but things like that are not helping him keep a lid on how absolutely head-over-heels he is.

“I’d be more upset if you didn’t look so good in them,” Ashton says before he can stop himself.  Luke’s breathing stutters, but he doesn’t do anything besides lean a little closer.  Ashton’s heart feels like it’s going to beat out of his chest.

“Come on,” Luke says.  “I still want to see the rest of your pieces, then we can go home.”

Home, Ashton repeats to himself.  Luke thinks of your house as his home.

They wander their way through the last few canvases, then stop briefly in the photograph and colored pencil room before stepping out onto the street.  Their hands brush as they walk, and Ashton wonders if he can get away with grabbing Luke’s.  This night feels significant in so many ways.  Something has shifted, and he’s not sure if it has to do with his art career or the man beside him.  He wants it to be both so badly he aches with it.

When they have two more blocks to go before reaching the house, Luke reaches over and threads their fingers together.

A/N: I don’t have synesthesia, but the first three song paintings really exist and can be found here. the one for os/co was made up by me.

[onestowatch]

R.LUM.R on Vulnerability, ‘The Last of Us 2,’ and His Debut Album ‘Surfacing’ [Q&A]

Budding R&B singer-songwriter Reginald Lamar Williams, Jr., popularly known as R.LUM.R, takes listeners through a transformative journey in his album Surfacing. The album is an empowering palette of emotions, exploring themes of vulnerability, self-awareness, and mental health, all having to do with a personal voyage of his renewal of self. 

His first album ALTERIMAGE dropped in 2017 with the track "Frustrated" gaining the Florida native 50 million streams on Spotify alone and the spot as the face of Spotify’s Alt R&B playlist for six months straight. From then on, R.LUM.R has been releasing singles that have amassed a large crowd of supporters and esteemed praise from the likes of Billboard, NPR, Clash Magazine, and Vibe Magazine.

We had the pleasure to speak to R.LUM.R. in-depth about the creation of Surfacing, his gameplay walkthrough videos on YouTube, and his future as an artist.

OTW: Powerful isn't even the proper word to describe your voice and the emotions that arise when listening to your music. I think a lot of that power comes from the sheer vulnerability we hear in your voice. Vulnerability can be a scary thing, but you seem unafraid to lay yourself out in your music. Is it difficult for you?

R.LUM.R: Well, It certainly can be challenging, just the idea of facing yourself candidly. But for me, the idea that someone may really need to hear what is laid out in the music is more important than whether or not I’m scared to say or express whatever I’m feeling. It becomes less about the story being tied to me, and more about the story itself. Then you’re just a facilitator.  

OTW: Do you think your vulnerability plays an important role in dictating your path as an artist? For example, do you believe because you are in touch with your vulnerability that it would prevent you from creating music that strays from that?

R.LUM.R: I believe that vulnerability comes in many forms and it’s not really that productive for me to compare one version of what it looks like to another version, especially when it comes to the output that it creates. I think it’s probably better to just follow the intuition and leave it that. Let it be what it is.

OTW: Your debut album Surfacing is here. Creating anything to showcase to the world can be a nerve-wracking experience. How would you describe your creative process during the making of this upcoming album? What helped springboard the creation of Surfacing?

R.LUM.R: I could safely say that Surfacing was a transformative time for me, and I think you hear that in the music. I think I got to process a lot about things like guilt, shame, depression, anxiety and all that. I hope it helps someone else do the same, honestly.

As for a springboard: I still have the note on my phone from August 30, 2018 at 3:59am that I wrote after having spent a somber few hours on the phone with someone I was with. The note was basically the beginning of “Making A Choice,” which became the first song on the record. It's wild to have a memento of the exact moment you started to make a record you now have, even before you know you were gonna do it.

OTW: For me personally, before I write something I like to take time to meditate before beginning. Did you have any rituals or small actions that were "must-haves" in order to write, sing, or produce any part of this album? 

R.LUM.R: Honestly, I’m such a creature of habit that you would think I’d have some specific superstition or process or something, but I can’t say I do. I wish.

OTW: Can you expand on the themes that you incorporated in this album? What were some of the struggles or internalized emotions that you explored during the creation of the album that you'd hope fans—especially those of us who also struggle with internalized emotions or mental health struggles—could make a deeper connection to?  

R.LUM.R: Well, I don’t want to tell anyone they have to feel a certain way about anything in particular on the record but I know for me a lot of this was surrounding my experiences with anxiety, loneliness, and the general malaise I think a lot of us feel but maybe don’t know how to process. I’m hoping maybe if I invite people into my efforts to process this stuff with something as tangible and real-time as a record, maybe that stream of consciousness will help them in their own processes. I think we all just want connection.

OTW: "Lonely" is a very beautiful song that showcases such a great amount of self-awareness and emotional depth. What inspired this track?

R.LUM.R: Thanks for being so complimentary. I recall walking into the studio that day with Scott Hoffman and Daniel Wilson, and feeling quite heavy that day. None of us had ever met at that point, but I think that energy I was emanating was probably pretty palpable. I was getting near the end of the writing of the record, and I was frankly exhausted, so I was much less in control of how I was feeling and reacting to things. I recall after me being awkwardly quiet (and probably standoffish) for a while, Daniel asked what was going on, and I feel like I just told them everything: the problems I was having with my mother vs my sisters at the time, how who I was dating at the time was upset about me being gone so frequently, the strain on other relationships around me, and etc.

Based on that we could’ve easily written something that seemed like nothing was gonna get any better, because that's how it felt at the time, but I’m glad we decided to take a view that was more big picture and optimistic. Instead of writing a “You'll always be alone” song, I wanted it to become “You’ll never be left alone because someone is always here for you and can understand what you’re going through.” I think that’s a lot more helpful contribution.

OTW: If you could describe each song in your upcoming album with one word, what would it be?

R.LUM.R: Necessary.

OTW: What is your favorite lyric or verse from this upcoming album? What does it mean to you?

R.LUM.R: There’s a lot I really love on the record, but the section I come back to the most recently is from “Making A Choice:”

“I don't want to spend my 20's tired, drunk, and alone Justifying why I keep you up all night on the phone I know say it's cause I love to hear the sound of your voice But it's more accurate to say it's just more clear than the noise That I can always kinda hear in spite of all that I do It’s television static playing loud from another room To which I’ve never found the door to go and “just turn it off” but I can never stop looking for it... I'm making a choice”

OTW: It's clear that you are a truly unique artist. Your impressive voice, your powerful visuals, your willingness to open up and discuss mental health so openly. But, I also saw that you also delve into matters outside of music such as gaming. How did your gaming walkthroughs first start out?

R.LUM.R: I love that y’all watch those! I enjoy watching playthroughs of stuff that I may not have the time to experience for myself. There’s a full video explanation on my youtube as to why I do that, but Suffice it to say Resident Evil 2 is a storied game for me, so when I say they were remaking it I had to do something with it.

OTW: When I saw that you had a walkthrough of the Resident Evil 2 remake, I instantly subscribed. You're such a character! Do we have any future gameplay walkthroughs to look forward to tuning into?

R.LUM.R: Thanks for watching! I’m definitely looking forward to The Last Of Us 2, for sure. Big fan of Naughty Dog.  

OTW: What do you hope to manifest in the next couple of months in regards to your career?

R.LUM.R: I just want people to find themselves in the record, and to talk to them about it on tour, which is also coming soon.

[lionpridezines]

Meet the folks who will be modding Lion Pride zines!

Mod Drew | @boggled-senseless

Hey all, Drew here (aka @boggled-senseless on Tumblr) and I’m one of the music and finance mods for this zine! I’m currently doing a degree in technical theatre production, specializing in audio design, and I’ve been performing music for most of my life, starting piano at 8yrs old and percussion at 12yrs. This is my third time as a mod for a zine and as soon as I saw this project even being thought about I was thrilled! As a member of the LGBTQA+ community as well as an artist, having a project like this that encourages not only LGBTQA+ work, but original stuff as well is, I think, greatly needed. Plus I’ve never seen a zine involving music before and am extremely excited to share and collaborate with the mods and participants!

Mod Finn | @milk-is-nutritious & @finwritesthings

Hello lovely folks! I'm Finn, a mod for this zine - with a focus on working with the writers! For social media I have two (2) tumblr accounts with my main being @milk-is-nutritious, which ranges from memes to political issues, and my slow going writing blog under the handle @finwritesthings - I also have a twitter by that same name! A little fun fact about me is that I'm a huge nerd when it comes to the ocean - especially sharks! I once spent half an hour info dumping about sharks to someone I had just met about an hour prior to that conversation. I also spend a lot of my time educating folks on queer issues, which played a huge part in wanting to help make this zine a reality. That and the fact that Nick is an incredibly talented and well organized person who I knew would propel this zine into being a complete smash! I work part-time as a peer support worker at an HIV/AIDS and trans health clinic as well as sitting on my city's pride committee as the youth outreach and coordination personnel. I have spent the last few years since coming out as trans doing various workshops education staff at schools, students, health care providers, and various organizations on queer identities, language, and how to be more inclusive. This zine is not only an opportunity to create queer rep, but is also an opportunity for queer folks to create that representation themselves - which is even harder to come by than queer rep made by cishet folks. I have also worked on 7 zines as a writer as well as currently running my own zine. I am so ecstatic for this project and I can't wait to continue forwards with it!

Mod Haryuu | @haryuusart

Hi, my name is Haryuu and I'm a Mod for the Lion Pride Zines! You can find me as "haryuusart" in basically any social media (Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.) I love creating art in any form, from drawing to music, and I hope to transform this passion into a job. That's one of the reasons I am motivated for this zine: projects like this give people the possibility to create and share their work, and it's so beautiful in my opinion. Plus, being part of the LGBT+ community myself, I feel represented and I hope everyone will feel the same way.

My mod roles are general organization, music and art, and what qualifies me is my experience in these fields: I participated in a lot of zines and events, both as a mod and a contributor, and I recently organized my own zine, so thanks to these I learned lots of things;

I love music immensely, it's one of my biggest passions: I've played the piano for many years and recently started learning the ukulele. I wrote some original songs and did covers of my favorite ones, and I'm so happy I can mod this part of the zines because it's very original and new.

Finally, as I said, I love creating; I'm a traditional and digital artist, I've drawn since I was very little, so art has accompanied me through basically my whole life. I have a Diploma in Ceramic design, earned after five years of an artistic high school. l I've done commissions and illustrations for short books and fics, and I hope to share my passion with as many people as possible.

I can't wait to start this wonderful journey with the other mods and the participants!

Mod Isaiah | @galacticcannibalisms

Isaiah @galacticcannibalisms on tumblr and instagram or @galacticanibals on twitter) is one of the graphic design mods for Lion Pride. I'm a graphic design/printmaking major with aspirations to go on to graduate school and then become a professor myself. This zine speaks to me because it aligns fairly closely to one of my dreams, creating an LGBT+ focused publishing company for stories about and by members of the community. 

My mod rules consistent mostly of focusing on the layout of the zine itself, as well as any additional design that's needed. This is the second zine I will be taking care of in this way, but I've had outside experience in collating and formatting large volumes on information and creating my own layout designs that are both functional and artistic.

Mod Jay | @agentnavi

Hiya! I'm Jay, a mod for Lion Pride Zines! You can find me on Tumblr as @agentnavi or any other social media site as jaythefae. I'll be working as a mod for finance, art, and music for this project. My finance experience comes from my time spent as a Campus Activity Moderator in college. As a campus activity moderator, one of my duties was to budget the supplies necessary for multiple events throughout the year. In addition to this, researching products to find the best possible price was also something I took care of as part of my responsibilities. For my art and music experience, I took up piano at the age of 8 and have played ever since alongside picking up the flute at age 11. I have a bit of experience playing the tenor saxophone as well as clarinet and have started teaching myself guitar. I have also been a fine arts student since age 11, attending an arts-focused middle school and independently pursuing my interest independently beyond that time. Being involved in this zine is super important to me because not only is it supporting original works by a multitude of creators, it's supporting LGBT+ works, potentially giving people the springboard they need to get their content out to more people and that's super cool to me!

Mod Nick | @nikneedsalife

Heya! I’m Nick, (@nikneedsalife on Tumblr, @nïck on Pillowfort). I’ll be working on social media, writing and the general organizational aspects of Lion Pride zines! This project is my baby, and I love it very much, because I adore LGBT+ fiction—you can usually find me in a corner getting emotional about it. I also really hope to give LGBT+ creators a platform for their work!

I’ve written for about eleven zines, mainly fandom, and have experience in modding about five others! I usually work mainly with social media and writers, but I’ve also gained a lot of experience in dealing with the general work, communication and organisation that comes with a zine. 

Mod Noah | @fricz-art

Hello! My name is Noah, also known as Fricz (@fricz-art over tumblr and FriczArt on twitter) and I'm one of the art and graphic design mods for this project. I majored in Animation and Visual Effects and soon I'll start a master in Concept Art and Storyboard (I'm really excited for this!). I have always been an art kid, I started with music and writing and finally found my true vocation with drawing. I'm very happy to be part of this project, since it's an excellent way for creators to show their original works and express themselves as part of the LGBT+ community. I'm excited to help and see how this project will evolve!

ABOUT | ASK | FAQ | SCHEDULE

[brown4eyedgirl]

On finding community in books

He rolled over and brushed my face with his hand. My husband and I have these moments after our long days. Together, in the quiet, away from the chaos of our separate work places, when I've put my computer, note books, and reading aside, it's just us.

After nearly five years of longing for a husband who would read in bed, I looked over and there he was lost in, another book. He’s now reading almost as voraciously as me.

“You have to get rid of some of the bad books,” he said softly, as if he hoped it would come off as pillow talk but instead it was a request to purge my book collection.

Before his fingers grazed my cheek, they were thumbing the spines and covers that line the shelves in my office. Some are beautiful books. Inspiring books. Books you want to go back to and read over and over until the pages are worn thin from fingers clutching them. Some are research books. Highlighted with post-it notes hanging out. And yes, some are bad books. But getting rid of them, recycling them, feels like an act of blasphemy or treason. I’m a writer and a library worker. Books are treasured, sacred, beloved, and my husband wanted some of them gone.

 “I’m a writer. I need to support other writers,” I tell him with every purchase of a new book. The thing is, it’s not just the authors of the titles that line my bookshelves that I’m supporting, it’s myself as a writer that I’m supporting.

                                                           ***

When I fall in love with an author’s work, I start finding and reading as many books, essays and articles by them as possible. This happened after I first read Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me. After Googling and reading for hours, I stumbled upon a list of tips she wrote for writers. Number 3 is “Read. And don’t Read.” The first time I read that, my heart sang. I put so much pressure on myself to sit with my fingers on my keyboard watching the word count on the piece I was working on climb. The pressure sat heavy on me, and if I couldn’t come up with anything to write, guilt would set in. Knowing that reading could be part of my writing practice liberated me. I’d always found inspiration in the pages of the books I bought and checked out from the Library, and now one my favorite writers had given me permission to get lost in books to keep my writing afloat.

Writing as a creative pursuit is immensely isolating. Before anyone gets up, I’m awake. I steal away a few hours in the morning, before I get ready for work, to write. In these hours I lose myself to my thoughts, to my frustrations, to my insecurities. Creating, for artists both literary and visual, means getting tangled in some of the deepest and darkest parts of ourselves in hopes that what we create will leap out and grab those who find it. One of the ways I cope with the torment that occasionally comes with writing is sighing. These deep exhales attract my husband’s attention from other parts of the house. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“That was a big sigh to be nothing.”

“I’m just tired.”

Tired of thinking of what to write. Tired of relying on my brain to think up new words for the ones I repeat too often. Tired of worrying about structure, voice, character development, themes. Tired of waking up at 5:50 am so that hopefully I’ll get 2 good hours of writing in before I must shift gears, do my hair, put on work clothes and turn in to the teen services coordinator at our community’s public library. This level of exhaustion causes me to feel depleted some days. I wake up, my brain barely recognizing my alarm, and drape myself over the kitchen counter as I wait for the kettle to boil so that I can make coffee that will hopefully provide just enough stimulus to help me write again. “But maybe, when writing feels like scraping your insides clean before you have a chance to replenish yourself, it’s okay not to set a word count goal in your off hours,” Alicia Elliott wrote her piece “On Burnout.” But how does a writer fill the well again without losing momentum? This is the fear I wake to every morning I decide to take a day off because the thought of stringing together coherent words makes me want to run into the woods and leave the world behind. What if when I sit down at my computer again, I can’t write? The words don’t come, and I can’t think of a beautiful scene to describe the time that my ex and I went snowshoeing to hot springs. My deepest fear is that my book goes unfinished because I simply couldn’t think of any more words to write. I worry about failing myself. This happens at least once every two months, and then I crumble. I wander the house, my work place, listless with a sullen look heavy on my face. Eventually I remember there is a place to go refuel and to gain the will to write again. I surround myself with writers, friends who’ve chosen the same life of torture and anguish, a community of writers that exists online, but most importantly the writers whose books have inspired me before.

                                                         ***

“I need a good book,” a member of the public said to me. I live for this question. I love recommending books.

“What do you like?” Every time I ask a library patron this question, I hope they’ll answer with nonfiction, as this is what I write, and most often read.

Our library is not full of dark wood and tall shelves stuffed with leather bound books. It’s a new space part with modern metal shelving, flooded with natural light. We don’t often shush people, and instead spend more time reminding those who expect total silence that this is a community space. Songs from story time will often reach the service desk and during a summer classical music academy, musicians use the meeting rooms to practice which causes flute, oboe and clarinet to seep into the nonfiction, mystery and DVD sections. An espresso grinder is heard at the public computers as the social enterprise coffee shop in the library prepares another latte for a student there to study for exams. This is the reality of our small-town library, we are more than just books. But when a moment to gush about a title I love comes, I take it wholeheartedly and will get caught up trying to find a reader a book they’ll love.

A favorite I regularly reach for, that sits on the library’s staff picks shelf with the handwritten sticker “Megan’s Pick” on it is Kyo Maclear’s Birds Art Life. At the other end of the library, in the children’s section, more of Maclear’s books sit on display selected as staff favorites.

There is a chapter in Birds Art Life on creative lulls. I’ve talked about this chapter to people who’ve heard me talk about it too many times. I’ve photocopied parts of it and read it aloud to a group of teen writers I work with at the library. I’ve shoved it into my husband’s hands when he’s wondered what to do with his life. “A lull can be soothing, tranquilizing and even restorative… Yet for many artists I know, the word lull signifies the exact opposite: the absence, the flaw, the incompleteness, something lethal and dangerous, a source of fear and melancholia.” The first time I read this chapter it was like Maclear had written it for me. She knew me, my struggles as a creative person, the trouble I had some days with self-discipline, the way sometimes what would start as “research” would devolve into online shopping. But it wasn’t just that she knew, she understood.

Looking at the shelves of books in my office and living room I find comfort. Kyo Maclear is joined by Sylvia Plath, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Caitlin Moran, Nick Hornby, Margaret Atwood, Vivek Shraya, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichi, Charlotte Gill, Ian Brown, Tanya Talaga and many more. Just glancing at the spines of these books, and the ones I walk past as I move through the library during my work day remind me that I’m not alone. There are others like me who have struggled with themselves, and the world to share their work and their words with the world. While I sit alone in my office, with my computer and my thoughts, I’m part of a community and a history that’s bigger than just me, and the books I sit with daily connect me to all the writers I know, love and am inspired by.

[celtfather]

St Patrick's Day Playlist 2019, 3 Hours #400

St Patrick's Day starts early with three hours of Celtic music from the award-winning Irish & Celtic Music Podcast.   http://bestcelticmusic.net/

The Gothard Sisters, Banna De Dha, Beyond the Pale, The Duplets, Lochlainn, Clan Celtica, Irish Whispa, Keith Hinchliffe, Kyle Carey, Ceol Gan Achar, Vicki Swan & Jonny Dyer, Bedlam Bards, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Rose Rock, Ella Roberts, Bangers and Mash, Screaming Orphans, Ceann, Ed Miller, Kennedy's Kitchen, Dark Patrick, Paddy's Pig, We Banjo 3, Talisk, Lothlorien, Madd Paddy, Marc Gunn, Kinfolk, Gaelic Storm, Fergus, Albannach, Calasaig, Derek Byrne and Paddygrass, The Hallions, The Fighting Jamesons, Hexperos, Dervish, SeaStar, The McCabes, Old Blind Dogs, The Kreelers, Conor Caldwell, Runa, Seamus Kennedy, Brobdingnagian Bards, Johnson's Motorcar, The Canny Brothers Band, The Poxy Boggards, Celtic Soul, Ockham's Razor

I hope you enjoyed this week's show. If you did, please share the show with ONE friend.

The Irish & Celtic Music Podcast is dedicated to growing our community and helping the incredible artists who so generously share their music. If you find music you love, buy their albums, shirts, and songbooks, follow them on Spotify, see their shows, and drop them an email to let them know you heard them on the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast.

Remember also to Subscribe to the Celtic Music Magazine. Every week, I'll send you a few cool bits of Celtic music news. It's a quick and easy way to plug yourself into more great Celtic culture. Plus, you'll get 34 Celtic MP3s for Free, just for signing up today. Thank you again for being a Celt of Kindness.

VOTE IN THE CELTIC TOP 20

With the new year comes a new votes in the Celtic Top 20. This is our way of finding the best songs and artists each year. Just list the show number, and the name of as many bands in the episode as you like. Your vote helps me create next year's Best Celtic music of 2019 episode.

THIS WEEK IN CELTIC MUSIC

0:05 "The Three Coins" by The Gothard Sisters from Story Girl

3:34 "Comb Your Hair & Curl It / The White Petticoat / The Black Rogue" by Banna De Dha from Band of Two

8:29 "Catalpa Rescue" by Beyond the Pale from Wantin' Something More

12:02 "Garry Porch's" by The Duplets from Leverage

15:07 "Green Window" by Lochlainn from Fisher Street

19:07 "Triantan" by Clan Celtica from Tribal Thunder

22:34 CELTIC FEEDBACK

23:08 "Rising of the Moon" by Irish Whispa from Irish Whispa

25:54 "A Wee Dram or Henry the Horse's Hornpipe" from Keith Hinchliffe from A Wee Dram

27:48 "Cairistiona" by Kyle Carey from North Star

30:40 "Hedigans Fancy Hawson" by Ceol Gan Achar from Ceol Gan Achar

34:59 "Grandpa Joe" by Vicki Swan & Jonny Dyer from Twelve Months & A Day

39:48 PATRONS OF THE PODCAST

41:11 "Whiskey in the Jar" by Bedlam Bards from Furious Fancies

44:22 "Jenny's Story" by The Merry Wives of Windsor from Tales from Windsor's Tavern

46:35 "Down by the Sally Garden" by Rose Rock from Aire Loom

49:22 "North Wind" by Ella Roberts from North Wind

53:18 "Paddy's Day NYC" by Bangers and Mash from Whisper Valley and Other Stories

56:49 "Dr. Gilberts Sel" by Screaming Orphans from Taproom

59:49 CELTIC INVASION VACATIONS

1:00:26 "Almost Irish" by Ceann from Almost Irish

1:05:38 "London Town" by Ed Miller from Follow the Music

1:09:48 "Christy Barry's Jig/The Rolling Waves/The Old Favorite/The West Clare Reel" by Kennedy's Kitchen from The Birds Upon the Tree

1:14:27 "Eamonn An Chnoic" by Dark Patrick from Fainne Gael an Lae

1:17:21 "Henry My Son" by Paddy's Pig from Maple & Wire

1:20:47 "Two Sisters" by We Banjo 3 from String Theory

1:25:29 "Rations" by Talisk from Beyond

1:32:33 CELTIC FEEDBACK

1:33:00 "Paddy's Green Shamrock Shore" by Lothlorien from Single

1:37:27 "The Leprechaun" by Madd Paddy from Arrived

1:39:52 "Henry Martin" by Marc Gunn from Not Every Day Is St Patrick's Day

1:42:19 "Paddy's Stout" by Kinfolk from This Land

1:44:53 "Kiss Me I'm Irish" by Gaelic Storm from Bring Yer Wellies

1:49:37 "P Stands for Paddy" by Fergus from Green St.

1:52:49 CELTIC PODCAST NEWS

1:53:51 "Auld Nick's A Piper" by Albannach from Eye of the Storm

1:56:21 "Lazy Bairn / Instrumental: Doug McPhee's Welcome" by Calasaig from Merchant's City

2:00:03 "My Only" by Derek Byrne and Paddygrass from Half and Half

2:02:52 "Devil's Kiss" by The Hallions from EP

2:06:53 "A Song for Letting Go" by The Fightling Jamesons from Every Day Above Ground

2:11:26 "Giant's Causeway" by Hexperos from Lost in The Great Sea

2:15:45 "Red Haired Mary" by Dervish from Midsummer's Night

2:18:47 CELTIC FEEDBACK

2:19:21 "Galway Bay" by SeaStar from Never Go Back

2:23:21 "An American in Paris" by The McCabes from Songs for Breakfast

2:27:34 "Died and Gone" by Old Blind Dogs from Room With A View

2:33:28 "Johnny Don't Go" by The Kreelers from Saints & Sinners

2:36:42 "An Art Revealed" by Conor Caldwell from To Belfast...

2:39:10 "Big Fellah" by Black 47 from Rise Up

2:44:49 "The Ruthless Wife" by Runa from Current Affairs

2:50:39 CELTIC FEEDBACK

2:51:25 "Wild Rover" by Seamus Kennedy from By Popular Demand

2:56:34 "Old Dun Cow" by Brobdingnagian Bards from Brobdingnagian Fairy Tales

3:00:26 "Redcrow/Tamlins/Gravelwalk" by Johnsons Motorcar from Funky Disco Hardcore

3:05:05 "Spancil Hill" by The Canny Brothers Band from One Drop of Whiskey

3:08:12 "The Drinker's Praise" by The Poxy Boggards from Bawdy Parts

3:10:10 "Tempest in a Teacup" by Celtic Soul from Way

3:20:00 "Lanigan's Ball" by Ockham's Razor from Ten Thousand Miles to Bedlam

The Irish & Celtic Music Podcast was produced by Marc Gunn, The Celtfather. To subscribe, go to Apple Podcasts or to our website where you can become a Patron of the Podcast for as little as $1 per episode. Promote Celtic culture through music at http://celticmusicpodcast.com/.

CELTIC PODCAST NEWS

* Helping you celebrate Celtic culture through music. My name is Marc Gunn. I am a Celtic musician and podcaster. This show is dedicated to the indie Celtic musicians. I want to ask you to support these artists. Share the show with your friends. And find more episodes at celticmusicpodcast.com. You can also support this podcast on Patreon.

Get our free app. Go to the iTunes or Amazon store to download the app for free. You'll be able to listen to every episode of the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, not just the latest 300. That's all that Apple Podcasts will allow. The app will give you access to every show.

You can join my band Kilted Kings at The Hangout in Gulf Shores, Alabama on Sunday, March 17th for St. Patrick's Day. Go to KiltedKings.com for details.

Subscribe to my Pub Songs Podcast. I'm sharing 11 St Patrick's Day facts in a couple weeks. But you can listen right now and hear some great Celtic Heroes & Musical Legends from the past show.

If you don't have an Irish & Celtic Music Podcast t-shirt, what are you waiting for? Get one in our store.

Have you seen our new bumper sticker? It was beautifully designed by Miranda Nelson Designs. You can buy it in our store. But from now until March 21, you will get a free bumper sticker to go along with your per episode pledge of the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast. Just sign up as a patron.

TRAVEL WITH CELTIC INVASION VACATIONS

Every year, I take a small group of Celtic music fans on the relaxing adventure of a lifetime. We don't see everything. Instead, we stay in one area. We get to know the region through it's culture, history, and legends. You can join us with an auditory and visual adventure through podcasts and videos.

2019 is the Celtic Invasion of Dingle. 2020 is the Origins of Celtic Invasions. You can find out more about these two exciting trips. Join the invasion at http://celticinvasion.com/

THANK YOU PATRONS OF THE PODCAST!

Big corporations want to force feed you Music.  Even though Celtic music is a niche market, There are big labels who want to tell you what music is good. With this podcast, you decide. Not a corporation. Not a billionaire. You!

The Irish & Celtic Music Podcast is listener-supported. I make this show free and let you, the listener, support the podcast through your kind patronage on Patreon. You can make a per episode pledge and cap how much you want to spend each month supporting this podcast.

Your generosity funds the creation, promotion and production of the show. Best of all, you get episodes before regular listeners, discounts on merch, and when we hit a milestone, you get extra special episodes.

I want to thank our Celtic Legends: Shawn Cali, Bryan Brake, Annie Lorkowski, Kevin Long, Hank Woodward, Rian P Kegerreis, robert michael kane, Theresa Sullivan, Hunter Melville, Scott Benson, Carol Baril, Lynda MacNeil, Nancie Barnett, Tiffany Knight, Marianne Ludwig. These amazing people pledge at least $25 per month to support the podcast.

You can become a generous Patron of the Podcast at http://patreon.com/celticpodcast

  I WANT YOUR FEEDBACK

What are you doing today while listening to the podcast? You can send a written comment along with a picture of what you're doing while listening. Email a voicemail message to celticpodcast@gmail.com

Bill Hayes emailed: "Hi Mark, I just became a patron and I just wanted to drop you a line and say thank you for alll the great music you play. I wanted you to know how much this podcast means to me, I’ve always wanted to explore my Celtic heritage and I always loved the music of my ancestors. Thanks for sharing all the independent artists that make this music!"

Brian McReynolds emailed: "I have been listening to your podcast since late 2005. I love the variety of music and love listening to the podcasts. For Christmas I got some Bluetooth headphones and have been listening to the podcast while watching college football bowl games. It has been rather fun watching the action on the field with such great music on instead of listening to the commentary."

John Helminski emailed: "Hi Marc, Thanks for your great podcast. Is there one specific show dedicated to Celtic harp music?"

Catherine Koehler emailed a reply to my reply: "How providential that you responded tonight...the very night that i was writing YOU, lol. I was at the best pub in Louisiana this weekend, Enoch's Irish Pub and Grill of Monroe, LA, and made sure the podcast was well represented.  I'm sending along a few pics of the podcast sticker that was ceremoniosly placed by Enoch's wonderful daughter Molly .  In her words " we're placing it down low so everyone can see it!"  Fyi...it is in front of everyone who stands in line for the rest room!! No billboard ever had a better placement!"

  Check out this episode!

[eyeodyssey]

Film Production Log #3

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″. What year is this? It’s been a long time coming that I finally got around to writing another one of these things. It’s three months into 2019 already and I hardly even noticed, made a rude awakening when I looked to the calendar to see that it went from 28 back to 1. With all that, it hit me that I hardly wrote about the progression of any of my current film projects in that period of time. I thought I had a rough idea of how the passage of time worked, as it turns out I know as little about a concept as abstract as time as I do about every other thing in life that defies explanation. There’s a reason why I simultaneously dread everything and nothing after all. I’ve written through many variants of this first paragraph beforehand, each draft starting off with the same “long time coming” comment, which gained further relevancy with each rewrite. Let’s go and cut this ongoing habit before it goes beyond simple procrastination into flat out absurdity.

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″. Like mentioned with the second production log, we spent most of the December of 2018 haphazardly preparing a forced move that we had to undergo with the sudden gentrification of our apartment at the time. This wasn’t the first time I faced the systematic Kafkaesque horror of gentrification. I was pissed, to say the least, and I did the only thing I could do, I documented it. With The Death Of A Home as it is currently, all the footage from the move itself has been compiled and made into a rough cut, adding up to my first proper feature length film at an hour and 12 minutes. The film is comprised of long shots, with scenes ranging from a crew of biohazard workers cleaning the basement of a black mold infestation that was never reported to the tenants to a sequence where long kept hand-painted furniture is forcibly discarded (tossed down a staircase into the back lot to lead to a rain of multicolored paint shards). The whole film will also be accompanied by a harsh noise soundtrack, I mostly have Merzbow stuff playing throughout as a placeholder. I’ll be shooting on the side some abstract visual sequences for the documentary, communicating certain details of our story that weren’t captured on film. I have a lot of ideas brewing for the mixed media techniques I could use for creating these images in a live action format, specifically ones that return to the sort of trash bag special effects that I used in my prior film concerning the subject of gentrification, Weightless Bird In A Falling Cage. Setting foot in the new apartment, the first thing we came to notice was the absolutely vacant house next to us. The building was completely abandoned with electricity still hooked up, looked like no one set foot there in years. Having it face the bedroom every day, with our constant visual subjection and time to contemplate we came to the conclusion that something was gonna happen to the building at some point. It was clearly the middle child to an estate that left it to rot. Just in time for when we wrapped up unboxing everything, the building caught fire. At first I didn’t pay much mind to the sound of sirens driving through (it’s an Atlanta custom). It eventually hit me that something wasn’t quite right when I looked to one of the windows to see bright red, Suspiria technicolor light shining through.

A frame from “Burning Fragments: Mode 3 - Winter 2019″. Did I go out to have a look? Of course, so did the rest of the neighborhood. Made an interesting meet your neighbor type of gathering, to say the least. I also brought my camera with me, and I came back with a metaphorical stack of raw footage along with a slow-cooked pair of lungs, the film is more important though. From that raw footage, I got the visual edit for the short Burning Fragments, a part of my seasonal “Mode” series that was first kicked off by Hard Drive and continued by my currently unreleased Factory Dreams. Burning Fragments is a montage of morbidly humbling sequences, from a roof visibly caving in through the smoking windows to medical staff cautiously carting out a stretcher, prepared for the worst case scenario. No one came out injured luckily, though I don’t mention that in the film (to keep up the haunting atmosphere). Power was cut to the building, the fire was put out and the street stunk of smoke for the next month. I thought it smelt like a smoked rib, one neighbor of ours said it smelt exactly like pot smoke.

A frame from “Factory Dreams: Mode 2 - Fall 2018″. Right around there was where we thought the story would end, but several days later the building went back up again. This time around I went to one of the firefighters to ask what started the fire in the first place. As it turned out this second eruption was from the ongoing work of someone who had a great disdain to a singular sofa in the abandoned building. The first fire was started off by the arsonist setting this certain sofa aflame, and the guy returned to the scene of the crime to incinerate it for good. Our friendly neighborhood sofa arsonist is still on the run to this day. Going into rapid-fire mode, some other noteworthy moments of the year so far include: OS updating, film editor street fighting, more OS updating, cool experimental film screenings (as seen in my documentary Moonlight Tunnel), one last OS update for good measure and discovering the new OS is as thought out as a tumble down a staircase.

Kafka’s Supermarket sorta ended up bunched between everything, seeing one quick, sporadic development at a time. The issue with actors still stands, gotta track down some people for the film to act in those pesky performed segments. It all goes smoothly until you’ve gotta spend the time and physical resources of other living, fleshy beings into your freaky unscripted cinematic daydreams. Around the end of February, I collaborated with local collage artists Steven and Cassi Cline to write the dialogue for the film, collage literature style. We took several different approaches when it came to fully fleshing things out, some were done as experimental writing games while others were the more familiar cut n paste technique. The script took a wide variety of resources, including the FBI documents printed from the internet archive, the prologue of a Georges Bataille philosophical text and a book on nuclear weapons. I was largely the supplier when it came to the process, while I do visual collage stuff often I’m less of a writer (both letter by letter and cut up source by cut up source). Readings of the literary collages will be interspersed throughout the film with an announcer who seems completely detached from the surreal nature of the scenes he describes. Burroughs’ approach for writing Naked Lunch aside, the primary source of inspiration for this detail comes from my memories of a radio clock that we had during my childhood. I would tune through channels with it searching for classical music, but most often I’d find news stations. Not knowing anything about politics at the time (being 5 to 6 years old and all), the nature of what was being discussed was completely alien to me. With how Kafka’s Supermarket is focused on the nightmarish distortion of everyday life in capitalist America, I felt it was necessary to recreate the atmosphere of those broadcasts that confused me all those many years ago. One detail that left the production hung for a significant amount of time, as minuscule as it may seem, was the masks the actors would be wearing. The visual style of Kafka’s Supermarket was adapted from my 2017 zine What Brought Me To This Point, an experiment in nihilistic writing that focuses on the mental state of a man with prosopagnosia and a non-specified mental illness. My general understanding of prosopagnosia at the time was admittedly limited, I had just heard of a condition where someone couldn’t recognize faces and something about the idea creatively resonated. From this, all the characters were designed with the same basic facial template, prioritizing the bare essentials of the human face with an emphasis on the uncanny. Kafka’s Supermarket further branches out this aesthetic in using it as a wider embodiment of the lack of individual personality in a capitalist state, where everything is selling to a set of categorized markets that represent the general populace.

A frame from “Kafka’s Supermarket”. The thing is, human heads aren’t structured like these figures I was drawing. I spent an absurdly long time contemplating how exactly I could recreate the look of these characters not only with a budget but with a budget without having it look too “store-bought” in a way. The main catch was I was going by realism and not surrealism. At that point, I briefly lost sight of what exactly I was doing. We all make mistakes. I brooded on how I could convincingly recreate an abstract illustration. It took until I started reading the screenplays of Kōbō Abe that sense hit me again when I questioned how it would be done in a theater production. That was when I remember that I’m making a non-narrative experimental film, not something like a superhero fan film where a certain level of suspension of disbelief is expected. Since then I plotted out an alternative that’s simultaneously more affordable than anything I was theorizing beforehand while also being more surreal and true to the theories and atmosphere behind Kafka’s Supermarket (and even it’s predecessor, What Brought Me To This Point). Since then I’ve found myself further experimenting with the fusion of film and theater, specifically the use of minimal props and images to convey a greater concept. I’ll be reposting cast calls for actors through the next several days, hoping for the best while I also simultaneously pester a nearby grocery store for permission to shoot a short sequence on their property. Productions like this are the ones that leave me realizing the oxymoronic nature in pursuing capitalist chains about the production of strictly anti-capitalist cinematic rhetoric.

A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″. While juggling well more than a handful of personal projects (all the films mentioned earlier, a second chapter of Iron Logs and a harsh noise album experiment), I also convinced myself that I can get back into animation again. I was publicly tiptoeing around the idea of a second Wilderness Within Hell film for a while, and now it seems that it will likely be a thing with Empire Of Madness. It’s not really a direct sequel as much as it is a continuation of the style that was first started with Madhouse Mitchel. Set in the same age of industrial totalitarian inferno as Madhouse Mitchel, Empire Of Madness follows the life of Prometheus after his divine punishment for giving mankind knowledge. Having finally passed physical torture in the complete separation of his physical body, Prometheus wanders the Earth as an anomalous figure that assembles itself in a seemingly manufactured, mechanical nature. With pieces of his blood and flesh inherited by every man and woman with his given wisdom, he is inconsequently responsible for a curse put on all of humanity that destines man to collapse in paranoia and violence. Prometheus is shunned by everyone who crosses his path, seeing him as a sickly demon. Prometheus comes to realize that aside from his physical torture, the true act of divine punishment enacted on him will be the experience of having his own creation slowly destroy itself while it collectively tries to kill him.

A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″. I’m simultaneously writing the film’s screenplay while I draw certain visual intensive scenes. Like I mentioned I’m still a bit rough around the edges with writing, so for this phase of production, I’ll actively study Kōbō Abe’s scripts and also the screenplays to an Akira Kurosawa film and Battleship Potemkin. I’ll still in a way aim more to minimalism with how certain things play out, with this series’ influences in Japanese guro art it’s more inclined to create a certain nightmarish atmosphere above all else. While Madhouse was largely anti-systemic rage, this film leans more to bleak existentialism. Bits of the soundtrack are already recorded, the main theme can currently be heard here. That’s about all I have to write for now. Now to wait another four months until I post anything text based on here again.

[gracieoliviamaller]

Weekly summaries and evaluation- Folklore collaboration

Weekly summaries and evaluation- Folklore collaboration

Week 1

The first week of the project and we had briefing and Annie asked to work together. I knew I was also working with Eszter so was hesitant to take on a second project but she said she had no one else to collaborate with and was struggling with ideas so I decided to collaborate. Currently not exactly sure what to do yet, only that  I wanted to do an anthology. We both like the idea of having lots of tiny stories.  I know I want to work in 2d digital and Annie does as well but she prefers mix media animation so we may add in that as well.

I am also collaborating on a side project currently for Glyndebourne and Norwich theatre. Which is taking up a lot of my time as it is due in in two weeks time so I feel I did not spend as much time as I could’ve on the first week of this project.

However I did not want to let Annie down so suggested to meet her next week to discuss the idea further and get a more solid plan.

Week 2 

We had our first brainstorm together and from this the notes were

- exploring ghost stories/folk law. 

- animating in mixed media 

- incorporating photography and doing digital cut out animation as well maybe, but also using the photos in a stop motion way. I want the piece to be fluid in a sense of style and Annie and I have very different styles so this was decided to perhaps be the best way of combining our skills. 

- Mixed media -> 2d animation, stop motion, paper cut outs

- Anthology- folklore/ ghost stories. 

- Inspiration: Tim Burton, Robert Morgan, Asano Inio, American Horror Story

- Norwich Ghost stories

- Gogol Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

- Mental State

- Song of the Sea, Secrets of Kells

Theme - nature

Annie had some style ideas of things she knew she liked but I did feel I was steering the story ideas a bit more and directing the conversation as she wasn’t too sure on ideas.

We then had to make a presentation of our ideas so far and I made the presentation for us and the  schedule as well. I am taking more of the director and producer role it seems, although Annie says she wants to be a director as well.  

Next week I want to really further the visual research and start looking into some folklore.

Week 3

This week I really went in with all the research and looking into different visual references such as the films of Guillermo del Toro and also American Horror story. I have also begun to look into a lot of different artists and animations on Behance and collecting a lot of different research on my blog. Really researching creepy animations and how they control the atmosphere with colour and sound.

I have begun to look into several folklore from around the world and make a short list of what can be in the animation. I have shared my findings with Annie in another meeting and she likes the research I have done, she hasn’t done much herself yet but informs me she would like to be in charge of the story board. So I agree to this as she seems keen on doing it and I have done most the work so far so it would be fair if she was in charge of this. 

The plan is to have a script by next week so that the story board can be done. I have made a short list of all the folklore I ahem found that we will have in the animation.

Week 4 

We had a lesson today with Helen and discussed our ideas so far, I pitched our idea to her and she suggested a few things to research and look into which I have made note of on my blog and looked into. The plan is to have the animation be a bit of a factual fantasy, exploring different folklore from around the world and what they do. I find folklore very interesting which is why I came up with this idea and have looking into it so much. I am very excited with the project so far and how it is turning out. I have written and completed the script on my own for our animation and given a copy to Annie with the aim of having a finished story board for next week.

I have begun to sketch out my designs and imagery for the folklore characters I have found and start to think about the visuals for the piece. 

Next week I want to develop these designs further and finalise the story/ideas.

Week 5

I have now done in-depth research into each folklore character I have selected for the animation and drawn some line drawings on my computer for each character. I have split the animation up into sections, 1,2 and 3. as we travel through different worlds and I want the colour pallet to change and adapt the further into a dream we go, I have created a mood board and a colour pallet for the animation. Section 1 is real world and grey scale. Section two is first dream layer and muted colours. Then Section three is the final dream layer, a dream within a dream so I want the colours to be very vibrant and psychedelic. Annie hasn’t done the story board this week but assures me she will have it done by next week which is fine, we still have time. But I am starting to feel as though I am doing all of the work while she doesn’t participate. I hope that I am wrong and she proves me wrong but I have a bad feeling that this is going to be all my hard work with her name put on it.

I have also continued the research for the animation looking at the folklore and different artists and film/tv for inspiration. One artist in particular has peaked my interest. I haven’t ever seen their work but they did a folklore series on their instagram and it is exactly how I imagine the Section one to look. The artist Boguskatya on instagram used greyscale and woodland to theme their folklore style images.

Next week i would like to have a story board and start some concept art.

Week 6 

I have begun concept art and drawn the Nakki folklore reaching his long creepy arm out of the murky water to grab the child from the edge. I am very happy with the visuals I have created and excited to continue developing the animation. We have allotted who is doing what in the animation, I am animating Section 1 and 2. Annie is doing section three. Unfortunately Annie has still not done the storyboard for the project so I am concerned if she will be able to complete it. I have offered to do the storyboard as well if she can’t do it as I don’t want to have to rush it last minute if she lets me down.  I have to be honest, I am very concerned about her affecting my grade if she continues to let me down and do all the work myself. As it isn’t working as as group which I thought was the aim of the project. Again I really hope i am over thinking this all and it’ll be fine but I am not very comfortable with the working dynamic if it continues into next unit.

for next week I am again hoping for a story board from Annie and I will continue some concept art.

Week 7

We had another group meeting this week, this time Annie has shown she she has started ta couple thumbnails of the story board, but she isn’t following the visuals of the script I sent. She forgot there was a script to follow and was doing it from memory so the storyboard is back to nothing. She has suggested we include a spirit world to the animation in her section so I have amended the script to the extra scene. 

I have continued my research on the folklore and changed a couple of the characters, getting rid of the Arabian characters and introducing Mara instead as she was more relevant to the story. 

This week the script is finished completely as I do not intend on editing it any further and all the folklore are set now too. So I am happy with the progress I have made and have also asked Annie if she can have a storyboard finished by next week before we breakup for Christmas so we can go away and get on with things aside from the collaboration project as it is difficult to communicate with Annie over messages and I won’t be seeing her till the day we submit our work so ideally it would be good to have most of the project finished by week 8.

Week 8 

Still no story board from Annie. I am very concerned at this point as she hasn’t done her share of the work throughout the project and I have done all the work to date. I’ve had to take on a leader role in this project otherwise I doubt we would even have an idea. I feel terrible having to write that  my partner has let me down so much but I also don’t want her to take all the credit for the work I have done.

Moving forward the plans for over Christmas are:

-Finally get much awaited storyboard from Annie

-Character designs from Annie for her Section three folklore characters

-Finalise my own concept arts for all my folklore

-Make the group Pre Production Document 

-Possibly make the storyboard myself

-create title card for animation 

I have created a schedule for the rest of my work up to deadline and as I have mostly finished my work on the collaboration and have a lot of my fable animation and essay to complete as of yet. I will be checking in on Annie to see if she is getting on with her drawings for the project or if I will need to help and do those as well.

Christmas break

Week 9, Week 10, Week 11, Week 12

Over the break I became very sick during week 11 and 12 and have lost a fair bit of time to sleeping off a flu/virus type thing with intense migraines. I have been working on designs when I can. I also got a message from Annie on Christmas day to say she can’t do the storyboard and I will have to do it. So I spent a couple hours doing the storyboard for our group project as well as all the other work for our pre production document. I was honestly very let down by reviving her message and just hope that all my hard work has paid off as this is essentially my own individual project at this point. 

Submissions week

Week 13

This week I have been finishing off the group document and managed to get a couple of line drawings from Annie for the document of her characters. I am very pleased with my own work in this project as I feel I have gone beyond my share of the work and managed to come out with something I hope to animate next term successfully. It was mostly finishing touches I had to do this week as I had completed all the work mostly a week ago. 

Evaluation

This project has unfortunately not been as successful as my other collaboration with Eszter has been, where we shared the work load equally and worked as a team, collaborating ideas. This project has been heavily my own work with little to no help from my partner through out the process. I really had hoped to have a successful collaboration, as Annie is my friend, but I feel that she has taken advantage of this and the fact that she knows I will do the work if she doesn’t. I hope that next term she proves me wrong and redeems herself by putting in 110% to the animation as I believe this is her only collaboration so maybe the work load will be easier for her. However, I have found that I have learnt a lot of leader skills from this task as I have been in charge the whole way through and organised the project start to finish. If the project does go into production next term I am excited to continue to develop the characters and narrative I have created and see where my story can go. I am interested in trying to achieve a creepy aesthetic and narrative to the story I have come up with, which is something I have not attempted before and would like to be able to explore the different genres of animation/storytelling. To conclude I have enjoyed the task of the project and am happy with what I have produced and will animate and continue to develop next term, but it has also put a lot of stress on me to carry the project myself which wasn’t fair.

[eclecticpatrolsweets]

Fog strange talk Season 3 ——Jinjiang City 2020 Top12

(Language: English;Shooting: American group;Released in: USA, worldwide)

preface

The city was swept by high temperature, and there were two pairs of mandarin ducks, who migrated for a long time to build their nests and settle down in a warm place. One was unable to bear the high temperature and fell, dying on the concrete floor. One opened its wings to block the hot sun for his partner. The male struggled and died soon. It was a long way and a spare dream. The mandarin ducks did not eat or drink, and rested beside their husband.

Mandarin ducks are amorous, not to mention people in the city.

TOP12 hell

Sheng walked on the road, passers-by arranged just right.

They're doing their part on the street, pretending to be real people.

He enjoyed the reverence of the city of Jinjiang, like the murder of a rabbit, who knelt at his feet in terror.

When the broker finished reading Friday's copy, he sounded angry over the phone.

"What rubbish is it? Is it a haunted house adventure? Is it a one-man play? Is there beautiful language? What do you do at home every day? Think of going to a white bar to buy something special, or tracking where people get their food. I'm not asking you to write a play. I'm asking you to write a fantastic novel. Is this a novel about vampires? Why are there hunters? What effect does Wei Dongshuai have after all? After I read 20,000 words, I suddenly realized that this person is like a passer-by, so why did you create a character with a name in chapter 2? I could drag any man on the street and write a hundred times better than you."

Sheng calm tone said: "please don't be excited, time is very rushed, the third episode shooting to the release, it is only a few hours, I can not take care of the left and right. I hope you can calm yourself and not be so angry. We have plenty of time."

"I'm telling you, they don't think they have time. Your colleagues hate to rush things, it's too real, it's too intense, it's virtual, it's imaginative, it's not about putting the real world on TV. Everyone lives in the real world and does not need to be shown the real thing a second time. You don't need to construct the authenticity of a city, you just need to describe the curse of the city, why is the city cursed? What the hell is going on? People who don't matter, die, get killed, get eaten by vampires, to create a visual experience? Trust me, the first few episodes can shape the sensory experience, but the next one has to be really theme-based."

"What shall I do? There's not a lot going on in this city, the cars are too strange, just killing one or two people. A child fell, but there was not a trace of blood around him. Or a man jumps into a river, but he jumps on a board in the water. Don't you think it's funny to jump onto concrete? Am I writing an extended daily sketch book?"

"If you don't have a plot, you can walk with me, or you can go out and do your damn job and stop eating this mess. Now that you're poor and you don't have a penny to your name, there's someone you can contact to give you a little charity, but not for long. You need to think about your story. The first chapters are excellent because they all have a common theme: what kind of existence is the cursed Jinjiang City? After the plot began to have a relationship with people! But what is the connection to the city? I remind you again, what we want is not a photograph, what we want is the oil painting after artistic processing, artistic. What audiences want is an escape from the real world, otherwise why would they spend so much money on TV sets? What else would a TV station do? Why else would a network sign a cast? Why else would a network sign you up? If you are in the United States right now, the host of the television station has criticized some of the people on the air for you. I know, even if you're a writer, we all want to give the new season a completely different world, a completely different artistic atmosphere, which the audience will call wonderful incredible, but is it still difficult? I think there are difficulties."

"What should I do? My teeth have been yellowed and loosened by the poison of jinjiang city's neuroticism, and the poison has made my brain less flexible than before. Do you need me to sit by the manuscript and think for a whole day, but I can't write a word? It's like the script you wrote yesterday by a passer-by. It's really wonderful, but I don't know how many years he worked on it." Sheng retorted.

"Your arrogance disheartens me. Nobody cares if you've been poisoned, if you've been poisoned! I think they're going to write a new story where you end up being fed to the walking nonhumans in the graveyard. To be Harry in the video, I think you could be a madman in a horror movie, you could smash the bedroom door with an axe, you could meet two children with red tides behind them, and of course you could live in a palace with a maze outside. I think you're writing about the city, not the enigmatic haunted house of the first season."

"I think I will."

"You have a lot of story in your content, and you don't have to have dialogue to show that things happen and things exist, why don't you describe what happened, why don't you have characters who do what they do. I'm sure it would be wonderful to write about them doing these things. Will the whole world watch your monologue?"

"I need a little advice."

"Well, as a professional agent, LET me give you some professional advice. As a nocturnal creature, you either have to stop sleeping, or if you go crazy, the characters in the story will go crazy too. People like to see crazy creatures. Art has its uniqueness, when you delete your manuscript, there should be no similar content in the future. The artist created a completely different artistic atmosphere, the beggar in the TV series, she used to be a nice woman in the second season. Why does he look at his words in the new TV series and think they are very attractive, but no one buys them? Because they are similar. Because she's not really an artist. In addition to the sausage in the factory, people will buy it constantly, those pictures like photos can be done by the photocopier, a larger piece of paper, some wood on the frame can be worth a few dollars. Tell me, what's your favorite description?"

"I love to describe what happened."

"Yes, when you spice things up and use your skills for twenty years, things become art, and you're always unique, because you're never going to write another book that looks exactly like the one before. You're influenced by the cast, they don't want the script, they want the audience. They're not looking for a laundry list of how Harry and his wife fell in love? They want to know, in another country, a legendary writer, who he really is? How shameless! How filthy he really is. What did his heart long for? What circumstances shaped such a writer? Americans want to see hell, please make hell on earth. You've been to hell, you've written 33 Days in Hell, and you can't even be calm to fully describe the reality of hell. It's all too real."

"I think I have already understood how to think and create the following plot. Maybe the characters in the plot are not important, but what kind of story is important. I want to express the abnormality of this city and the abandonment of God through language dialogue."

"If you're talking about stories, I'm sure your sad little city doesn't have enough stories for you to write about. Harry's wife can't die because she was an angel. '

[inthenameofthebody]

Music, Meditation, Painting—and Dreaming

A conversation with Philip Glass and Fredericka Foster

Philip Glass

and

Fredericka Foster

FALL 2021

We are on the phone, freewheeling about our practices: music, art, and meditation. Another day, we are in Philip’s kitchen, sitting at a wooden table. Behind us are comfortable couches and a private outdoor space. Philip’s partner, the artist Saori Tsukada, is working with flowers in the urban garden surrounding the house.

—Fredericka Foster

Philip Glass (PG): I was talking once to Gelek Rimpoche [1938–2017] about meditation, and I asked him, “Isn’t it just paying attention?” Yes, he said, “that’s absolutely what it is.” Meditation is a nice fuzzy word that we all like to talk about—but paying attention is placing your mind and functioning in a different way.

During the few years I have practiced meditation, I have worked with a number of texts. Say I am reading texts I have read many times—I’m thinking of the first Panchen Lama’s book on guru devotion [Lama Chöpa: The Guru Puja], which is not well understood. It is not about the guru; it is about the devotion. When I decide to really pay attention, I go back in my memory and look at some of the initiations I have taken. I watch the language change from awareness to remembering. It is possible to train the mind to increase memory.

I once asked the [scholar-teacher] Demo Rinpoche how many books he had memorized, and he replied that he wasn’t doing much memorizing at all—he thought only about 19! I’m sure it is many more now, and Gelek Rimpoche had memorized a library. The Tibetan culture cultivated the idea of memorizing. The passing on of wisdom could have been very accurate, since this was their main way of sharing information. The Tibetan lamas would memorize entire books and then, looking at a particular page, include the footnotes from other books they had read to verify a particular idea or lineage in the book they were writing themselves.

Fredericka Foster (FF): And here I am, still working to memorize all the texts that I work with daily! Memorization is also a part of a visual artist’s training. When we learn to draw, we work from reality—say, at its simplest, a still life. First we draw a series of lines to establish a compositional placement on the page. Then we memorize a line, draw it, and go back to the source to check it. We keep doing that until we have trained our hand to accurately follow our eye. Another memory exercise involved going through a pile of one thousand prints in a day and then discussing what we had seen. Or we would spend hours in front of a single painting and then sketch it out later.

PG: Culture has often been passed from one generation to the other through the power of memorization. We know the Bible was written 200 years after the birth of Christianity, so we assume it was made up. But it is possible that a sharp mind could remember very clearly and pass it along to another sharp mind, so the passing along of wisdom could have actually been very accurate, maybe more accurate than you would find in books, which are subject to typographical error, bad editions, and missing pages.

FF: Tibetan Buddhism attracts a lot of visual artists, and I suspect it is because we take easily to the many visualization exercises available for practitioners. I remember your telling me that your father taught you to play mental chess, which would certainly serve to sharpen your memory.

PG: Yes, he began doing that with his brother to pass time while they were waiting for the papers to be delivered for their paper route. And he continued playing with me and my brother.

If you go back to the 15th and 16th centuries, people didn’t write down everything. Many people didn’t write at all! One memorizing trick was to visualize a bookshelf and to actually visualize the names of the books on the shelf. I tried this once to see if it would work with a dance company in Australia. There were 20 people in the company, and we worked with them for a few days. With each member, I visualized their name on a book cover and put it in a certain location on an imaginary shelf. The last day I was able to say goodbye to each one, correctly remembering their names while looking at the bookshelf I had created in my mind. And they said, “How did you do that?” Well, what I was doing was trying to see if that thing worked. It did work.

“When that intensity of attention is applied to creating, you can’t stand outside and watch it; you have to give up the witness.”

FF: And we both did a lot of memorization in school—of poetry, speeches, and so on. It’s helpful when we memorize sutras and prayers today.

PG: All that also serves to assist us with the flow of attention. I once heard someone say he didn’t understand meditation. I said, “Forget that word; just pay attention to what you are doing.” We had been talking about infinity, and my friend suggested it was the flow of eternity, and I said that is the whole idea, the process of the mind attending to what you are doing, one moment at a time.

I find that when that intensity of attention is applied to creating, you can’t stand outside and watch it; you have to give up the witness. People ask me all the time, “Where did that music come from?” I have no idea, because all my energy went into writing the music. Since I had no awareness of myself writing, I had extra energy to increase the depth of concentration. It left me without the awareness of doing the work. I discovered that being aware of myself creating was an indulgence I couldn’t afford.

FF. It sounds like you have somehow overcome dualism when you are writing music. It’s like the state we work to achieve in order to become one with the object of meditation.

PG: Actually, when I decided to explore where music lived, I found that music comes from dreaming. I noticed I would wake up with a piece of music very clear in my mind. I thought these were stray ideas, but then I became curious where these ideas came from—the dreaming function of the mind is not ordinarily available to us. So I decided to wake up and write it down.

Recently, I was considering working on King Lear, a play I don’t like very much, and I was thinking I don’t want to write music for this. I finished the play and went to sleep. Then, at 5:30 in the morning, I heard music playing, and realized it was King Lear music and that the play was all about Lear’s relationship with his daughter; everything else was distraction. I went to the piano without hesitation. I started to write words by hand to describe the idea, then I sketched the music—a few measures. I thought it was the beginning of Lear, but actually it was the end.

FF: I keep pen and paper at my bedside and write or draw ideas as they appear. I haven’t done much with these ideas, but you are inspiring me to pay closer attention to them.

PG: Dreaming is the most personal and unique function that we don’t normally share with others. In analysis, we paid a lot of attention to dreams, but I am not talking about Freudian analysis and projecting it onto everyone else. What I learned from analysis was to give up my interest in the uninteresting—all those family issues made me bored with myself, and I didn’t have to do that anymore. Maybe the analyst knows this is what is happening. I read that during the first two hours of sleep, the mind looks at the day just past and sorts out memories to be preserved and those to be put away. The mind acts as an archivist. The creative part comes close to morning, before you wake up. When I wake up, I ask myself What was I just thinking? It is probably what I was dreaming about.

FF: Are you talking about lucid dreaming?

PG: No, but I can stand at the door of my dream and look into the room, as it were. It’s not complete, but it’s enough. Before I write, I access that dreaming state. I may never understand the dream, but what is important is that the material of the dream has become available.

FF: You encouraged me once to see the Cocteau Orphic trilogy, which inspired you to write an opera triptych. Those three films explore dreams and myths and can be watched again and again. When I moved from doing paintings exploring the symbols of faith and myth to working with images of water, I felt that I moved into metaphor and closer to the dream state. I am so relaxed looking at water. It frees my mind to wander, and I get new ideas, or watch old ones come together.

PG: The challenge of any artist is to keep the fire of creativity alive. What we mostly do is, we get good at doing something, and we keep doing it and don’t change much at all. If I look at the work of Sol LeWitt [1928- 2007], it is extraordinary, but it doesn’t change much. [Josef] Albers did manage to work with a square in a square over and over, but while they might look the same, they are not the same at all because of the influence of color.

An artist like me wants radical change. I found that the engine of change was working with new people and the new ideas they brought to the conversation. It didn’t turn into a formula, but I often did this.

Bob Wilson and I did [the opera] Einstein on the Beach, and it was very successful. To avoid doing “The Son of Einstein on the Beach,” I next did the opera Satyagraha, which was completely different. That was counterintuitive. We all want to please people. Your gallery wants you to make more of the same kind of paintings because they were successful. Most people follow success with another similar one, but I wanted to keep creative thinking alive in the process.

Every time I made a big change, I would lose a lot of people, but I would get some new ones. I found 50 percent of people liked it and 50 percent didn’t.

FF: After the Fischbach Gallery [where I regularly showed] left New York and went online, I found my work changing. I’ve always had to solve a new problem with each painting, but now I feel free to change what I was doing in a more radical way.

PG: I’ve noticed your work is changing. I have turned this change idea into a mantra: I am never happier than when I don’t know what I am doing. Still, I have moments of panic. How is this going to work? It can be very stressful trying to do new things, and I am not always completely successful, but I change as much as I can.

I discovered it was impossible not to do something familiar to some degree. When working in theater, I had to have at least one person who would come with me into a new project. I had to find a compromise about what I was willing to know and not know. I found I had to take something with me. Parts of my language would have to be the same, or my task would become impossible.

FF: In your ninth symphony, I feel like you are communing with the cosmos; there seems to be a seamless interaction between art and meditative revelation.

“I have turned this change idea into a mantra: I am never happier than when I don’t know what I am doing. Still, I have moments of panic.”

PG: Our minds are working all the time, but we can’t drive thoughts into awareness. As an artist, you are distilling your thoughts all the time, or listening to music, or paying attention to images. You are probably painting very differently now than you did when you were young, and some of that will be due to the fact that you have learned how to master your attention.

Once when I was in the mountains of Mexico with friends, we had to cross a valley to where we left our car. It looked to me like we didn’t have time to get there. If it got dark and we were in the desert, we would be in trouble. We started walking in a focused-intention kind of way—they called it a walk of attention. A walk that would have normally taken 40 minutes took 10. I had that experience of being able to pay attention to my attention, to actually cross a valley in a much shorter period of time so that we got to where we needed to in the light. We’re talking about pretty hardcore reality. The only way to do it was to command my attention to the point where I was able to make that happen. You can say “Well, you just made that up.” Of course I just made it up; how else could it have happened if I hadn’t made it up? But the fact of the matter is, I got across the valley before the sun went down. I know you’ve experienced something like that in painting.

FF: Yes, and at those times it seems that the painting paints itself. Later, I think, How did I do that? I’ve also experienced the sensation of entering the consciousness of animals, or even fish, when I have been watching water; suddenly feeling the sense of hunger and of being prey at the same moment—imagination becoming compassion. Music, art, and meditation are all means of accomplishing deep mental targeting of our feelings of interdependence and compassion.

PG: Bravo!

[j-wonwootrash]

Wonwoo || Novels & Webtoons

Word count: 1.9k Genre: Fluff, Student!au, slice of life, romance A/N: Sorry if it’s badly written but I hope you all enjoy reading!

“Nothing Much.”

———

When Wonwoo was little, he loved books. He could spend hours in the mini library he had that his parents renovated for him. They would purchase him a lot of series, especially those that were eventually adapted into a movie. It was finally his paradise.

Enclosed and introvert, he wasn’t the type to mingle with everyone— he thought novels were such a good company. His classmates found it hard to approach him because he was always with his novels, around 3 of them on the side of his desk. It was as if he ought to finish them within a day.

Because of his love for novels, he loved creating and coming up with new plots and stories of all genres. He planned to write his very own series and maybe soon publish it. Who knows?

But other than being a bookworm, he loved gym and music class. They were the only way to rest brain from too much words and of course, no one knew except him. He has best friends too— Mingyu, Soonyoung and Seokmin, people he became close with.

You and Wonwoo had quite a strange encounter at class. He was your classmate but you didn’t really paid any attention to him, mainly because he had his novels. You’d say he was those characters in stories that weren’t really important in your life, that is you considered yourself a heroine.

There was one time you had to continue your webtoon series as readers have been anticipating the next part of the climax. You needed inspiration, and for that you definitely needed time. During lessons, recess, and heck, even gym class!— you’d bring out your drawing tablet just to continue drawing. You knew you had to keep your readers because if not, goodbye fan base and goodbye opportunity to become a known webtoon artist.

“Can anyone give me some symbolism that we could see in Lord of the Flies?” Mr Kim, your literature teacher asked while he walked back and forth at the front of the class. He spotted you, who was scribbling quite vigorously with your head down. “What’re your thoughts y/n?”

You shot your head up embarrassed, bringing your pencil down to your desk as the class had their eyes on you. “Uh..” Your voice quivered and full of uncertainty.

“I see you weren’t listening, like always. Not a surprise. Detention after class.” He said as he took your drawing tablet. He still had a smile on his face, yet there was a hint of disappointment in them. When he saw you nod, he looked around the room for others who could answer. He saw Wonwoo, one of his best students in literature, dozing off with another novel in his desk.

“Wonwoo, can you help y/n answer?” He gestured to you as he had your drawing tablet in his hands.

“Well..” Wonwoo trailed off, unable to answer as it was clearly seen that he didn’t paid any attention. With his specs on, he fixed it as it was slightly crooked on the bridge of his nose. Cold sweat slowly trailed down his temples then to his jawline. Like a familiar encounter, he felt the pressure despite being the best one in class.

The bell rang indicating the end of the lesson. Mr Kim called the both of you for detention, confiscating your beloved things. “You may get these after you submit an essay of what we discussed today.”

“Gee thanks for dragging me to detention.” Wonwoo walked alongside you at the corridor, heading to towards an empty classroom.

“What, you’re blaming me? You were doing something else too.” You opened the door and sat on a desk to begin writing.

“Yeah Mr Kim wouldn’t have known that if you answered the question.” He grabbed the pile of papers in your hands, the tone in his voice reflected the annoyance you gave him.

“Afraid that I’ll ruin your reputation, top student?” You chuckled which basically made Wonwoo more annoyed.

“Says the one doesn’t even have a reputation.” He immediately made a comeback and for sure you heard him mutter ‘last’ that made you hurt— well, because first, drawing webtoons did not define you of being not bright; second, it did not mean you put education as last priority; and third, you had a huge crush on him. Hearing that from him only made your eyes form beads of tears.

Quiet, you looked at him with eyes he had never seen. It was a new discovery of you. Oh how you felt stepped on with that attitude of his. Now you knew he had that side of him, you swore to never talk to him again. Wonwoo felt a little accomplished for making you quiet with your ignorance of him. You didn’t know his burdens of an eldest child, where pressure was put onto him. He only wanted to make his parents proud.

“Webtoons requires creativity and lot of inspirations. A guy like you who reads and writes novels often should know that.” You sniffed in a low voice, obviously hurt.

He saw you leave the classroom, your completed essay on your desk. He thought of what you said, that was so true and it made him feel pure guilt. Your paper was blown off of the desk by the gust of wind outside, it flew to Wonwoo’s side. As he took the paper and read it, your way of words was something he never imagined.

You were creative and bright.

———

You sat still in your seat, unable to do other things than drawing. Sure Wonwoo did hurt you but you love him to the point you forgave him. What bothered you was your drawing tablet. Mr Kim called you out to tell you that he accidentally dropped it whilst running to punish some students. He wanted to get you a new one but you refused, saying that it wouldn’t bring back your drawings. You didn’t have any other hard drive where you had your drawings saved, and that was basically the only one you got. The latest chapter of your series were there and it was gone. It wasn’t even saved in your Drive because well, you didn’t have time.

Whenever you wanted to talk to Wonwoo he would look away and acted like you weren’t there. You knew he wanted to apologize but couldn’t so you just let him be— wait until he was ready.

It pained Wonwoo to know that you did not dare to look at his way. It pained him to see you stop drawing, that was something you loved. Why did he do that? Why would he hurt you? He didn’t have that attitude in him and yet he still did it. He never imagined hurting a girl, someone he actually loved. Countless of times he encountered you at the canteen, you would only avoid him. His heart felt crushed.

Heck, he had so much things that went through his mind and he couldn’t even utter a single sorry well because, what could an apology do? He knew it would only hurt you more.

He grunted in his seat that made his friends wondered his behavior. “Yo dude, what’s up?” Soonyoung fisted the boy’s arm.

“Nothing much.” Wonwoo lied but it made the boys shrug their shoulders and before they stood, they heard him say something.

“What to do if you hurt someone you love?” He scratched his head. Mingyu, Soonyoung and Seokmin knew what he meant.

“Approach her and say that you’re really sorry. Make it up to her.” Mingyu nudged his Hyung.

“Or try to explain to her that you didn’t meant it, that you did it without thinking.” Soonyoung said.

“Hyung, I’m sure she’ll understand.” Seokmin assured him, as he was close to you too.

———

He followed you to your house after school even though he felt like a stalker. This is stupid. He just had to talk to you and he kicked the stones that blocked his path. The stones led to you. As he looked ahead, your small frame showed him how fragile you were, how you skipped meals just to continue the series. And yes he did read the series after that fight.

“Y/N!” He finally called out to you, who turned around to see his worried face. Immediately you stopped in front of your house and he caught your hand. “I’m sorry!”

“‘You’re the most terrible snob’, Wonwoo.” Your lips formed a slight smile, at least that was what he thought he saw.

“Me?” He asked and a realization hit him. “Wait is that a dialogue from ‘Me Before You’?”

“A guy like you who reads novel often should know that.” You whispered.

The familiar sentence brought Wonwoo back to that day. Guilt hit him but it didn’t bother him. “You’re not mad?”

“Why would I?” You shrugged your shoulders as you looked elsewhere. ‘I can’t get mad at you because I like you.’ was what you wanted to tell him.

Wonwoo dropped his novels that made you look to him, his cheeks now were pink and you realized. “Did I just say it out loud?” You cupped your mouth in shock.

He nodded and you picked up his books to his arms. “Just forget I said that Wonwoo, you can leave since I forgive you and—“ You turned him around for him to start walking, and he suddenly turned around to face you.

“And I like you too.” He confessed, satisfied that you weren’t mad at him anymore.

———

Since then you started to go out with Wonwoo and experienced all sorts of dates; the carnival, cinema, aquarium, bike rides etc. It had been six months ago and he was still head over heels for you.

One time he asked you to create and draw for him a visual representation of his novel trilogy. You didn’t want to at first since he wasn’t a fan of cartoons and the colors were kind of too much for him. But since he got so used to you, he started to like it.

He published his first book online after few reviews from his friend who worked at the firm. It gained a lot of readers who were interested in it and they requested for the cover page for the protagonists. You gladly accepted his offer; he was your boyfriend after all.

Your date was postponed since Wonwoo had to complete the last few pages of the second book. You were at his place for a little while. He was obviously tired and was to take a break. You felt his presence behind you as you drew your webtoon series on the small table, with the soft carpet underneath you.

“Just let me rest for a while.” he let his head lean onto your small back frame. “One minute is fine.”

“One.. Two.. Three.. Four..” You began to count even though your heart was beating fast. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty-“

“Hey that’s cheating.” He said so bluntly and right now he purposely put his weight onto you.

“My one minute is soon over though. And I get to decide on how to count, not you.” you excused.

“You’re as sly as a fox y/n.” He rested his hand to the floor. “Should I do something sly to you? Like in Fifty Sha—“

“What the heck you-“ you tried to push him away, only to be cut off with his actions. He wrapped his arms around your waist, he practically hugged you that your back was by his chest. “What’re you doing?”

“Recharging.” His chin was on your shoulder and you felt his breath tickle your ear. “I need energy and you’re the perfect one to keep me going.”

“So cheesy.” You scoffed but inside you were dying with butterflies that continuously punched your stomach. “But I like it.”

Wonwoo sniffed your strawberry-scented hair in response, giving you a kiss before he dozed off to dreamland. 

[silmarillionwritersguild]

During this challenge, you will choose one character whom you want to study deeply and complete prompts and activities designed around developing a deeper understanding of that character. Prompts aren't only writing, and one does not have to complete them all. You may complete one prompt or all thirty--all participants will receive a creator stamp, regardless of how many prompts they complete. (There will be special stamps for those who complete higher numbers of prompts.) You may complete the prompts in any order. Some prompts include additional questions to spur your thinking on a topic. You do not need to answer all--or any!--of these questions in order to satisfy the prompt.

Click below the jump for more details and the prompts.

Due Dates

Participants have two months, until 10 January 2018, to complete challenge prompts for a stamp. You will have an additional week, until January 17, to report your progress, if you want a stamp for this challenge. Once your progress is completed, comment on Dreamwidth, on LiveJournal, send us an ask on Tumblr, or email us with the number of prompts you completed. (Make sure you let us know your SWG username, if it is not obvious from your username or email address.)

How to Report Your Progress

When reporting your progress at the end of the challenge, please let us know

1) the number of prompts you completed by the due date and

2) which of the following formats you attempted: creative writing, nonfiction/meta, art (graphic or traditional), and multimedia (podfic, video, infographic, etc).

How to Post Your Responses (if you want to)

Because this is a study, you may not want to share all (or any!) of your responses. Given that, you do not have to post your prompt responses publicly, although you are welcome to do so if you want, and there is a 30-Day Character Study option on the archive challenge list. Please see below for instructions on how to post challenge material that is not meant to be regarded as a finished, stand-alone fanwork.

Stamps will be awarded on the honor system, since not all fanworks will be publicly available. As always, we trust participants' judgment to know if a response satisfies a prompt.

Finished fanworks meant to be read/viewed as stand-alone pieces are welcome to be posted as separate stories on the archive.

If you want to publicly share challenge pieces that are not finished fanworks, you should create a single story on the archive for flash writing, sketches, notes, research, links lists, and other material that you develop during the challenge. Do not post each of these items as a separate story. You may also share this content on our Dreamwidth or LiveJournal, or post a link there to the tag where you are collecting your challenge responses.

The Prompts

Drop Everything and Read, Part One. Take at least a half-hour to read what the texts say about your chosen character.

Down Memory Lane, Part One. Think about your character’s childhood (or the early days of their existence if they had no childhood). What was the environment and daily life of their formative years like? Did they have siblings? What was their relationship to their family like? Who were their friends? What made them feel sad/angry/frightened? What made them feel content/excited/happy? Who were their teachers?

Strong Points, Part One. Think about at least three strengths of your character - talents they were born with, skills they have learned, positive character traits… Write a scene in which your character really shines at something.

Home Sweet Home, Part One. Think about a geographical location where your character lived. Learn more about what life in that location might have been like: the climate, topography, seasonal changes, flora and fauna, or anything else related to that physical location.

What’s On The Menu? Your character’s food choices will be influenced not just by taste, but by their culture, environment and circumstances. Try to find out about what foodstuffs might typically be available to your character. What would be their everyday fare? What would be a special treat? Where does it come from? Who does the cooking?

Artistic Licenses. Take at least ten minutes to peruse fan art about your character. If you are working on a rare character about whom little has been drawn, you may substitute looking at fan art about a group of characters to whom your character belongs (e.g., Dwarves, female characters, commonfolk, craftspeople, etc.) Think about which fan artists best capture how you imagine your character and why. Think about how your character's appearance does (or does not) support other aspects of their traits and history.

Affiliations, Part One. Think about an important relationship your character has to another character in your verse. Spend at least a half-hour exploring that relationship in any way you choose. For example, you might read and research the other character, write or draw about their relationship, create meta or headcanons--your choice.

The Mirror Cliche. Authors are often discouraged from describing their characters by having them look at their reflection in a mirror (or a pool, or a puddle, or whatever). For this one exercise, we want you to embrace the mirror cliche! Write a scene where your character sees their reflection. What do they see? What do they feel as they see it?

Weak Points, Part One. Think about at least three shortcomings of your character - things they are bad at, mistakes they make, bad habits… Write a scene in which their failings play a pivotal role.

What's in a Name? Research the meaning of your character's name. Think about how that name fits the character but also what the name might more subtly imply about your character.

Drop Everything and Read, Part Two. Take at least a half-hour to read meta and scholarship written about your character. If you are working on a rare character about whom little has been written, you may substitute reading about a group of characters to whom your character belongs (e.g., Dwarves, female characters, commonfolk, craftspeople, etc.)

Down Memory Lane, Part Two. Think about the rites of passage your character went through. These can be mundane things like learning to walk, their first kiss, or taking an exam; formal ceremonies like a coming-of-age ritual, graduation or wedding; or life-changing events. Which steps did your character take on the way to who they are?

Home Sweet Home, Part Two. Where does your character live? What are their domestic arrangements like? What do their sleeping/dining/cooking/working areas look like? Where do they go to pee and poop? What about their tastes in interior decoration? Take the time to think about one habitation of your character in as much detail as you can come up with.

Big Ideas, Part One. Create a visual representation of the big ideas you've learned about your character. This can be a quick list in a notebook, a series of sticky notes, or a graphical representation … or whatever you want to make or imagine!

Big Ideas, Part Two. Using one of the big ideas from Prompt 14, revise an existing fanwork so that this idea is more strongly emphasized orcreate a new fanwork that brings this idea to the center of the piece.

Down Memory Lane, Part Three. Imagine your character keeping a box of little mementoes that are important to them. Write a list, make a sketch, or create a fanwork where these mementoes feature.

Affiliations, Part Two. Think about a group your character belongs to--perhaps a cultural group, a profession, a family or clan, or any other group of affiliated characters. Spend at least a half-hour exploring that affiliation in any way you choose, whether reading and researching the group, writing or drawing about the character's relationship to the group, collecting links and resources, writing meta or head canons, or anything else you can dream.

Fan Art/Fancast/Fanmix. Create fan art of your character. Don't have an artistic bone in your body? You can substitute finding three images of different people who would fit how you imagine your character to look, or three sets of clothing/costumes that the character might wear, or make a fanmix of songs that relate to your character.

Strong Points, Part Two. Revisit the list of strengths you’ve thought about for Prompt 4. This time, write a scene in which your character’s strong points cause them trouble.

Who Are You? Using what you've learned about your character, take a Myers-Briggs type personality test for your character. What do you learn about the person? What surprises you?

In Dreams. Your character is asleep and dreaming. What are their dreams typically like? Write or sketch a dream sequence that explores your character’s subconscious.

What Do They Think About You, Part One. How do characters close to the one you’ve chosen (family, friends, significant other…) see your character?

Drop Everything and Read, Part Three. Take at least a half-hour to familiarize yourself with fan fiction created about your character. If you are working on a rare character about whom little has been written, you may substitute reading about a group of characters to whom your character belongs (e.g., Dwarves, female characters, commonfolk, craftspeople, etc.)

Weak Points, Part Two. Revisit the list of shortcomings you’ve come up with for Prompt 9. This time, write a scene in which your character turns a weakness into a strength.

An Atlas of Everyday Life. Draw a map of a location familiar to your character. The location may be as small as a room or as vast as a realm. Include details important to your character's life or connection to this location.

Happy Holidays. What special days does your character observe? Research or invent the customs of a holiday your character loves to celebrate. (See Darth Fingon's Elven Holidays and Festivals or the Thain's Book for more information on canonical Middle-earth holidays.)

Beyond the Tales. Create a links list of at least eight sources of information that will help you understand an aspect of your character's life. For example, you may collect links that help you better understand the character's profession or a pursuit important to that character (e.g., hunting or harp playing). You may collect links on magic or mythology related to that character (e.g., telepathy or the trickster archetype). You may collect links related to the setting where the character lives, relevant real-world history, or anything related to that person at all. You do not need to read all eight sources; the idea is to have a starting point for future research and reference.

Down Memory Lane, Part Four. Imagine your character writing or dictating their autobiography. What parts of their story would they hush up or change to make themselves look better? What parts would they blow out of proportion? What parts would make them cry?

What Do They Think About You, Part Two. How do characters unfriendly towards your chosen character (rivals, enemies, ex-partners…) see them?

Show It All Off. Create a fanwork about your character: any format, any genre.

[theswanprincessofficial]

Rick Rich Answers Fan Questions

We had some of our most avid fans ask their burning questions for Swan Princess Director, Richard Rich.

His long-awaited interview is here:

Don't miss hearing Rick's voice answer the last question!

What got you in to animation?

When I graduated from college, I wanted to work at Disney. That had been my life desire. I had graduated in Music and I wanted to work in the music department. Of course, there were no openings for a young guy like me. Disney had a traffic department with about 30 people that would pick up and deliver the mail all day through out the studio. The idea was that the talent would be able to go around and meet people on the lot and if they found an opening they could move out of traffic into some area that suited them in studio. For 3 months I would write a letter to Disney and the next week I would call and the next week I would write another letter and so on. Finally they said “ok ok enough, come in and we will give you a job in traffic”. The traffic department did not pay very much and I was married and had a little boy. I decided I would teach piano lessons at the studio for extra income. So on my lunch hour I taught a couple of animators and a couple secretaries. The only piano I could find was right next to the head of the animation department. Interestingly enough, the head of the animation department at that time was named Donald Duckwall. I always found that funny. An Assistant Director was retiring from the animation department and in discussions of who to hire for that position they thought it would be nice to have someone who knew something about music so they didn’t always have to go through the music department. Donald Duckwall spoke up and said “well there is this young guy in traffic who teaches piano lessons everyday next to my office on his lunch hour”. They interviewed me and 25 other people applying for that job. The job was an Assistant Director to John Lounsbery who was one of the 9 old men, original animators; he was now going to direct Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too. I got the job! Really just a typical Hollywood story of going from nowhere to somewhere.

What was your inspiration to make The Swan Princess?

We wanted to make a fairy tale, a classic fairy tale, like Cinderella. Swan Lake had never been done and was very much an animation type project since the main character changes to a Swan. The only way to move forward on an idea like that is to have a great story. Brian Nissen and I started researching. We read different versions of Swan Lake, listened to the ballet, whatever we could think of. We were able to come up with a story concept that was really quite intriguing. We got more and more excited as we worked on it. The big breakthrough for us was the moon and how the moon worked into the story. She would only be a human when there was a moon. Every night she would change from a swan into a human as the moonlight touched the lake. That was a very exciting, beautiful kind of transition that could happen. What really made the story come together was that there are nights with no moon in the sky. It was a night with no moon when Odette was supposed to come to the castle so Derek could vow his everlasting love. But, of course, she couldn’t turn into Odette. She stayed as a swan. Odette had to fly to the castle and that gave us a really exciting and dramatic moment. Once we came up with that we knew we had a really great story.

Get the new Haunted by the Moon t-shirt here.

How long did the art take for the first film?

The original Swan Princess was in production for 3 years. The first 6 to 8 months was a development period. It includes writing the script and doing character designs to develop what each character will look like. The actual production period was 2 years. That is when we would do the storyboards, which all have to be hand drawn. Then we would do the layouts, which were also hand drawn, at that time. Then painting the backgrounds, completing the pencil art and painting all the cels. The art process took that entire two year period.

Check out the art here!

How long did the first film take to make without cutting anything out (in total)?

In animation we pre-edit the film. It’s not like live action where we shoot lots of footage and then we cut it all together. The entire animated film is put together in story reels using story sketches. The reason we do that is because animation requires so many people and so much money to get it all right that we don’t want to animate a scene that isn’t in the picture. We spend a lot of time in developing these story reels or anamatics we call them. They’re just still shots going from one scene to another. But we know how long each scene is and we know what the actions with be in that scene. Once we like what we see, we like the pacing of it, we like the dialogue that we’ve recorded then we move into animation. So there are very few out takes in animation. That doesn’t mean we don’t trim and tighten things up but its pretty much done in the storyboard phase of the production. So that is a big part of the 3 year production period that was required for The Swan Princess.

Are there any more productions that you are going to direct that will be in traditional animation?

Traditional animation is pretty much a thing of the past. The reason is that all of the major studios have moved into CGI. The great artists that it takes to draw a hand drawn animation feature just aren’t out there anymore. There is not eough of a demand. Back when Disney and Dreamworks and Warner Brothers were all competing for the artists there was a real boom in the need for the hand drawn artists. All that went out the window when the computer animation took over with Toy Story and slowly moved away from 2D animation. So the problem in doing more hand drawn animated film is not a desire but it’s finding the skilled and high-end talent that it requires to make a beautiful hand drawn picture. However, it is important to understand that even in the CGI world of animation it isn’t all computer and there is still the requirement for artists. We still use hand drawn art character design and storyboards. They are first designed with the pencil before we take them to CGI. Storyboard artists are very much in demand and those are the artists that visualize the written word from the script and make it come alive with drawings. Anyone who is interested in getting into animated film making does not need to specialize in animation, because that is not a step that is done anymore, but in the pre-production steps of layout, character design, storyboard, painting backgrounds and working with color. Those are still skills that every CGI production house requires. That’s where your emphasis should be put.

Experience the films on

Can you tell us something more about the series revival in 2012?

Back in the 90’s we made 3 full-length Swan Princess films and then stopped. When 2010 came around DVD sales were declining all over the industry but the Swan Princess DVD sales remained kind of steady. Sony Pictures approached The Swan Princess Producer and said “There seems to be a demand for this brand and fans out there that really like the films and the story. Would you be interested in making more of them”. We had originally thought they would need to be 2D animation, but it was really difficult to find the artists to do that. So we built all of the original characters in CGI and showed Sony that we could make them look pretty close to what they look like in 2D. They got very excited and we made the transition into the 3D world, into the CGI world. It has been so exciting because it opens up so many more possibilities of making the shows with many more visual effects.

Own the Swan Princess movies and music

How much different it is to make CGI movie than hand-drawn animated?

The difficult step in a hand drawn film is the artistry, especially finding the artists that can draw the characters so that they always look the same. Numerous skilled artists are needed because one artist can’t draw all the images of a character. Getting the characters to look the same through out the entire film is one of the biggest struggles and where we spend a lot of time and money. In CGI we build a model that is just like having a human actor. We don’t have to draw the character from every angle, which is very difficult in 2D. We can just shoot the model from a down shot, an up shot, any angle we need. That process has made the consistent look much better in CGI. No matter where we place the camera or what action the character does, it always looks like that character.The other thing that CGI adds to the process is that we get to use the live action camera. In 2D animation you pretty much can truck in, you can pan sideways but you can’t move the camera around a character. In CGI we can swish the camera around and do all of the dramatic things that you see in a live action movie. You can see this in all of the new Swan Princess films we have created, we are starting on Swan Princess 9 now and it is just thrilling to see what the camera can do in this show.Interestingly enough a CGI film is not much faster to make because some processes take longer in CGI that were shorter in 2D. A live action feature takes two or three years just like it did in the 2D drawing. It doesn’t save time and it is not cheaper. It just gives us capabilities that we didn’t ever have in 2D.For instance, when I was at Disney I was one of the Directors on The Black Cauldron. In that film Taran had a little bauble that could fly around, it was a little glowing orb. I can remember we spent 6 months on a scene where this little glowing bauble went into a cave. I wanted to make sure that the light from the bauble lit the walls of the cave. We had to make all the moving mats on the side of the wall to make it look like the light was moving across this cave, which was very time consuming. With CGI we just light it like a live action set and the bauble and the light move together. This could be created in a couple of weeks at the most.

How do you write a script for a Swan Princess movie? Where do you get ideas? Do you have plans where you are going with the story and the characters?

The stories come from a variety of ideas and requirements. Some are marketing driven. Some are fan driven. Some are just to fun ideas to experience with the characters. For instance, when we got into doing the CGI films in the series, Sony felt it was really important that Derek and Odette have a child. We didn’t want to repeat the process of growing up that we had done with Derek and Odette in the first film so we came up with the solution of having Derek and Odette adopt Alise. She gave us an opportunity to give Derek and Odette a child who could already talk and have her own story.We have had a lot of remarks from fans saying they want to see more of Odette and Derek and more of a fairy tale feeling. So in Swan 8 we have done a new story built around Derek and Odette, to capture the loving feelings that they had in the first film. Swan Princess 8 worked really well to give us a dramatic and rejuvenated love interest. In Swan 9 Alise and Lucas are now 16 and 17 involved in a love triagle with another Prince from China. Alise has to face difficult decisions about who she is going to love. It’s a very dramatic story and it captures all of the feeling that was in the original Swan film but with new characters.We don’t have a thru storyline, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings because these are not books. We come up with ideas that feed off previous stories but take us into new territory to keep all of the fans interested and show them the characters changing, growing up and facing challenges.

Get the deck of cards featuring The Swan Princess characters here

I love the character of Alise, was it risky to change the main character in the middle of the series? And will Odette ever have main role again?

Alise is still a side character. There are films that have really focused on her but she will continue to be used in the series to display the love Derek and Odette have for one another and for children.

Go Royally Undercover with Swan Princess sunglasses

Can I have hope for many more movies to come in the future beyond 8 and 9?

Hope is eternal! We are hoping that there will be many more and it looks like everyone is working to make that happen.

I've always loved the sidekicks - Jean-Bob, Speed and Puffin. I also loved the addition of Number 9 to the group (is it okay to officially count him as part of the group now?). Is it possible the original fourth sidekick, Whizzer, will return?

Yes indeed you can count Number 9 as a sidekick. His character is so entertaining. Another character in the show that really fantastic is Scully. There is something about him that draws you into the story.Whizzer was a fun, comic character in one of the earlier films. As we get farther and farther into the series there is always a chance that he could come back.

Is there a chance there will be at least one more movie with Odette turning into swan?

The idea of Odette of changing into a swan is a challenge. We get requests for that quite often but it is an issue that we face as storytellers.If Odette is changed into a swan it has do be done through magic, one of 2 ways, either through good or through evil.If we use evil, we will be repeating a plot that we have already used 3 times. There would be no suspense about Odette becoming trapped as a swan, rescued, probably by Derek, and will again becomes the human Princess Odette. It is not really good story telling.We could use good to change Odette into a swan. Once we do that and use magic to do that then she can change back and forth at will. From a storytelling standpoint the transformation loses inspiration and is no longer a vehicle for suspense or for the battle between good and evil.

Read the newest storybook where Odette turns into a swan.

What inspired the Transformation/title sequence?

Towards the end of the original show it came time to introduce the title, The Swan Princess, on the screen without giving away too much about the story. One of the highlights of that first film was seeing Odette transform from a swan into a princess. We decided to do a really neat art version of those special effects swirling up and bringing the title on screen. It is a mirror of the transformation in the show reflected in the title.

Our transformation nail wraps can be found here

Was Swan 3 originally meant to be the final film in the series?

The first 3 films were thought of as a trilogy so when we finished the 3

rd

one it was pretty much felt that it was the end. But what we didn’t forsee was that the fan base grew and wanted more. It was actually the fans that made all the new ones to happen because they clamored for more. Sony heard them and brought 6 more stories to life. It has been such an exciting opportunity to bring new stories and characters to the fans and to feel the love from the following that the original Swan Princess had.

When designing Zelda was she always intended to be as psychotic (and hilarious) as she is or was that a choice by the voice actress?

When we wrote the story for Swan 3 we wanted to have a comic villain and a female because we already had two serious, male villians with Rothbart and Clavuis. It gave us an opportunity to create a really amusing character. So the concept was in the script but the voice actor really brought Zelda’s maniacal personality to life.

Which Villain allied themselves with Rothbart first out of Clavius and Zelda?

The story Zelda tells Whizzer is only partly true. True – She found Rothbart languishing in despair after King William destroyed his power and she inspired him to work again. The part she doesn’t tell is that she and Rothbart were stuck. They needed help. Rothbart reached out to one of his younger rivals, Clavius. The three of them re-conjured the Forbidden Arts together. But after their success Rothbart turned on them both. They didn’t dare challenge his power at that time. After Clavius died in the mountain, Zelda never bothered to include Clavius in the story of the recreation of the Forbidden Arts because there was no one alive to challenge her account. She painted Clavius as an interloper who tried to steal what she and Rothbart developed together.

On the topic of the Forbidden Arts, have we truly seen the last of it in the series? Or is there a chance it might come back?

The Forbidden Arts was a power Rothbart had harnessed. There is a chance that the Forbidden Arts could come back if we discover a new and exciting way to give it additional powers so that it brings something original to the series.

Michelle Nicastro, sadly, passed away, but we were wondering if she were still alive today would you have kept her on as the voice of Odette?

Listen to Rick's answer here

The death of Michelle Nicastro was a real shock and it happened when we were just starting to do Swan 4 and rebooting up the series. It was every intention that we would use her. She was going to come in and we did not know at that time that she had been very ill and very sick. But when the time came in to record she called and said that she couldn’t do it. And she died 3 days later. And It was really a total heartbreak for us. Not because we lost her in the series because we lost an incredible actress and a sweet spirit. She, in her life, was as sweet as the character Odette. And I think that’s why she was able to portray Odette in such an incredible way, is because she actually was that kind of a person. And if she were alive today she would be the voice of Odette for as long as we could use her.

We handed this pin to the attendees of the original Swan Princess film in 1994, get yours here

About The Swan Princess

The Swan Princess is based upon the folk tale and ballet, Swan Lake. The story is transformed into a playfully fun adventure with exciting music, lovable forest friends, and of course, the handsome Prince Derek. The Swan Princess, Odette, has stayed true to original fairy tale princess with her kindness, grace, and loyalty.

Three reasons you should follow us on Facebook 1) Get a behind-the-scenes look as Princess Odette and Prince Derek continue their adventures 2) Be one of the first to be notified when new products are released and 3) Share your Swan Princess stories and tales with other die-hard fans.

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How to Make an Extra $1,000 a Month (25 Ways That Actually Work)

When I was in college, I felt like having an extra $1,000 a month would basically make me rich.

It seems silly now, but when you’re in college, $1,000 a month can go a long way.

You could use it to:

·     Pay down your student loans

·     Cover your room and board

·     Start investing early

·     Buy a heck of a lot of video games, pizza, or ramen

By my last couple of months in college, I finally hit that $1,000 a month income goal. But looking back, I realize I could have hit that number a lot sooner if I had known what I know now. That’s why I’ve put together this guide.

Below, I’ll show you 25 ways to actually earn a $1,000 a month. No questionable methods, no b.s., and no get rich quick schemes. Just ways that, with a little hard work, will pay off quickly.

The Right Mindset for Making Extra Money

Before I get to the methods, you need to understand the right mindset to have when looking for ways to earn extra money. I include this section because, as a college student, I made the mistake of spending way too much money on courses that claimed they would help me make extra money.

I’m not saying that the courses were giving bad advice, but rather that I made the mistake of falling for the allure of extra income without wanting to put in the work required to get it. Certainly, there are courses out there that can help you boost your income. But you don’t need any of those to get started.

To make extra money, you just need 3 things:

1.       Be able to do something people will pay for.

2.       Get people to pay you for it.

3.       Keep doing #2 till you’ve hit your income goal.

The above advice applies whether you want to make an extra $1,000 or $10,000. Of course, there are details to iron out such as what you’ll do and how you’ll find people to pay you for it. That’s what the rest of this guide is for.

25 Ways to Make an Extra $1,000 a Month

 Ready to stop dreaming and start earning? Below, you’ll find 25 ways you can actually make an extra $1,000 per month. None of these require expensive equipment, high startup costs, or even a degree. What they do require is hard work, creativity, and the willingness to try new things or learn new skills.

Freelance Writing

I’m going to start with a method that’s near and dear to my heart. Freelance writing was the first way I started making serious money when I was in college, and I still think it’s a great thing to try if you have writing skills.

There are a ton of companies out there that need written content, including blog posts, video scripts, website copy, and more. They’re willing to pay, too; a starting writer can easily charge $50 for an article. 

More experienced writers can charge $150/article or more, depending on the length and subject matter. Work your way up to that level, and writing just two articles a week could net you $1,200 a month.

To get started freelance writing, you have a couple of options. The first is to check out freelance job boards like Upwork, Fiverr, and ProBlogger. Alternatively, you can reach out directly to blogs who accept guest contributions. Both methods can work, though I had more success with direct outreach when I was starting out – and in this realm, I had the most success when I worked to build relationships instead of doing cold outreach.

You’ll also want to build a portfolio to showcase your writing. Check out our guide to building an online portfolio to get started on that.

If you want further guidance, including tips on how to pitch articles and get your first clients, check out this freelance writing course my friends Kristin and Alex created.

Graphic Design

A few examples of our graphic designer’s work for the CIG Podcast.

Companies aren’t just hungry for written content; they’re also constantly in need of graphics, illustrations, logos, custom slide decks, and other graphic design assets.  If you’re artistic or enjoy design, this can be a great way to make money.

The steps for getting started with freelance graphic design are fairly similar to freelance writing. You can search on Upwork, Fiverr, or even 99designs for gigs. Alternatively, you can ask around campus to see if anyone needs design help. Making business cards and logos for people can be an especially fruitful place to start.

If you want to learn graphic design, there are a ton of avenues out there. I’ll note that it’s important to learn both the fundamentals of design (composition, type, white space, etc.) and the technical skills, such as how to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Here are a few courses to start with:

·     Graphic Design Basics – Core Principles for Visual Design

·     Master the Basics of Adobe Illustrator

Web Development

Having a website is a must these days, yet so many businesses and individuals still don’t have one. This is a great opportunity for anyone with web development skills to make some serious money.

But what if I don’t know how to make a website? Just read our guide, and now you have no excuses. Combine that with a few web development tutorials on Skillshare, and you’ll have all the skills you need to build beautiful, functional websites for just about anyone.

Our web developer, Martin, was able to charge $1,000 for a basic website when he was freelancing. And those development skills eventually led him to a full-time career working for College Info Geek. So whether you want to make some extra money on the side or enter an in-demand, well-paying field, web development is worth learning.

If you’re serious about learning web development quickly, I recommend these resources:

·     The Top Web Development Courses on Skillshare — These are all classes taught by experts and will get you up to speed even if you have no prior knowledge. The link will also get you a 2-week free trial, plenty of time to get through the courses.

·     Treehouse — Treehouse is a website dedicated to teaching you how to code, and they have a large library of web development courses.

Audio Transcription

Voice recognition technology is getting better every day, but it still isn’t great at transcribing real human speech. For this reason, there’s a demand for skilled audio transcriptionists.

Audio-what-tionists? When transcribing audio, all you do is listen to a recording and turn it into a word document. All kinds of companies and people need this service, and they’re willing to pay. While you can do this on your own, it’s generally better to work for an audio transcription company. This way, you don’t have to find clients.

I recommend looking into Rev — pay starts at $0.36 per minute of audio, which means you need to transcribe around 50 hours of audio per month (12.5 per week) to hit the $1,000 mark. Plus, you can do this job from the comfort of your home, making it great for fitting around your busy schedule.

Helping People with Computers

Using a computer may seem second-nature to you, you darn millennial-Gen-XYZ whippersnapper. But for many people who aren’t “digital natives,” it’s not so easy. Instead of making fun of your grandpa for not knowing how to use his iPad, why not see if you can turn your knowledge into some extra cash?

The possibilities here are only limited by your creativity and what people will pay for. Just a few ideas:

·     Make PowerPoints for your less than tech-savvy professors (a former professor reached out to me about this just the other day)

·     Give a class on computer basics at a local retirement home or community center

·     Start your own IT business that makes house calls (a friend of mine made one contact in college who paid him around $200/month for very basic computer help. The guy was pretty wealthy, but knew nothing about computers.)

You can choose to charge per hour or per project — whichever makes more sense.

Bonus Tip: If you’re willing to take some time and spend a bit of money to get an A+ Certification, you may be able to charge even more. If you choose to go this route, you should get Mike Meyers’ (no, not that Mike Meyers) excellent CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, which is updated every year.

Investing Your Money

I’ll state this up front: Compared to every other method on this list, investing will take by far the longest amount of time to make you an extra $1,000 a month. Still, you should seriously consider investing as early as you possibly can.

Here’s why: Investing means putting your money to work for you. Every other method here requires you to essentially trade hours for dollars; investing allows you to sit back as the money you have invested grows due to compound interest. And the sooner you get started, the more that compound interest will benefit you.

Here’s a simple calculation: If you’re 25 now and you invest just $200 a month for the next 30 years at a 7% rate of return (which is reasonable to expect over the long term), by the time you’re 55 you’ll have a bit over $228,000 – even though you only invested a total of $72,000 of your hard-earned money.

That means that you gained a whopping $156,000 while you slept. And that’s assuming you never increase your monthly investment as you get further into your career; do that (as most smart investors do) – and get started as early as possible to reap the benefits of compound interest year after year – and you can retire with millions.

Here’s another calculation, this time looking at what it would take to be able to pull $1,000 a month out of your retirement savings every month for 30 years:

 Again, assuming you never increase your contribution (which is unlikely), you still only need to save $316 a month assuming you start when you’re 25. (You can use this Bankrate calculator to play with the numbers.)

How to get started: The main three things you need to know are:

1.       Tax-advantaged retirement accounts are your friends. A Roth IRA is a great place to start.

2.       Index funds are your friends. These passively follow the entire stock market, providing a good rate of return without too much risk.

3.       High fees are your enemy. Even a fee of 1% on a fund can eat a huge portion of your earnings. And funds that charge these fees almost never outperform lower-cost funds.

While you can learn and optimize later, these three rules are really all you need to get started.

As for where to start, Betterment is a great option; their fees are low, there’s no minimum starting investment (you could throw in $50 now and set up a $25 monthly auto-investment to start), and they adjust your investments based on your goals.

For even more information, check out our beginner’s guide to investing.

Selling Your Old Stuff

Your closet, garage, or attic is probably full of perfectly good things that you just don’t use anymore. Instead of letting them sit there collecting dust and getting in your way, why not sell them for some extra cash?

Depending on how much stuff you have, you could certainly earn an extra $1,000 doing this. This is especially true if your parents or grandparents will let you comb through their old stuff and sell it as well.

That being said, this probably isn’t the best way to consistently make extra money. To do that, you need to branch beyond selling your stuff and into selling other people’s.

Retail Arbitrage

Retail-what? So it’s a fancy business term, but all it means is going to stores like Wal-Mart, Target, or even a thrift store and finding items that you can re-sell online for a profit.

Generally, people use either Amazon or eBay to do this, though you could also look into a more specialized platform such as Poshmark or Etsy if you’re focusing on clothing or vintage goods.

Now, be warned — if you do this wrong, you can lose a bunch of money and waste a lot of time. You have to be smart about what you buy, which generally means using a tool like the Amazon Seller app (Android | iOS) to calculate your potential profit. But if you do it right, this can be an effective way to make money in your free time.

Fixing & Flipping Cars (or Other Vehicles)

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an old car or bike for sale in someone’s yard. While I don’t have the time or mechanical skills to do it, I know lots of people who make good money buying old vehicles, fixing them up, and re-selling them.

This is definitely an area where you need to know what you’re doing, and you’ll also need the appropriate tools and space. But provided you have those things, it’s easy enough to get started. Even if you spend a few months fixing up a car and manage to sell it for a $5,000 profit, that’s easily an extra $1,000 a month.

Babysitting or Nannying

People have kids, and they need a responsible adult to watch them. There’s good money to be made here, particularly if you have the time to do a more involved job such as nannying.

You can either go through a site such as Care.com or build up your own business through word of mouth. I have a few friends that were easily able to charge $20 per hour for this sort of work, which means you would only need to work an extra 12.5 hours per week to reach $1,000 a month.

Yardwork

This category covers everything that people don’t want to do in their yards. People tend to associate yardwork with warm-weather activities such as lawn mowing, but it can also include things like shoveling snow and picking up dog poop. With these activities, you can stay busy earning money all year round.

Pro-tip: When I was a teenager, I stood out from the other teenage lawn-mowing businesses by BUNDLING dog poop pick-up and lawn mowing. Differentiating yourself is key!

How you price this work is up to you — you can charge a flat rate based on the size of the yard (this works well for mowing or snow shoveling) or an hourly rate (which is best if you don’t know how long the work will take). As long as you charge enough, you can hit your extra income goals with only a few hours of work per week.

Cleaning Houses

Cleaning is something that has to be done, but many people don’t have the time or desire to do it. This is where you come in — with just some simple cleaning supplies and a few hours per week, you can earn great money.

To maximize your earnings, we recommend doing this gig solo. You’ll get to keep all the money you earn, and you can often charge a more competitive rate than a bigger cleaning company. Getting started is as simple as asking around, and it’s easy to charge $100 for a small house or apartment. Do that 10x per month, and there’s your extra $1,000.

Home Repairs

In a similar vein to cleaning houses, things around the house tend to break. While some people know how to fix them, plenty of others will go running to a handyman (or woman) whenever they need to patch a small hole or fix a leaky faucet.

If you have some basic tools and a little bit of practice, you can earn good money helping friends, family, and anyone else with simple household repairs. People will pay more for this than you might think — my friend recently got paid $100 just to help a co-worker hang a curtain rod.

Note: Please don’t blow yourself up, chop off your hand, or get electrocuted. Leave any major work to licensed professional contractors. But for small fixes, go for it!

Tutoring

Many parents will do anything to help their kids succeed, even if it means spending lots of money. Tutoring is a prime example of this. After all, how is your neighbor’s kid going to get into Harvard at age 15 if they can’t pass their first-grade algebra class?

Okay, this might be a bit of an exaggeration, but lots of parents freak out when their kid is struggling even a little bit in school. To fix this, they’ll often hire a tutor, and that tutor could easily be you. As long as you know more about a subject than a kid and are good at explaining things, you can be a tutor (though some parents may want you to have certain test scores or grades in certain courses).

Reading and math are definitely the most popular subjects, but you can tutor anything that kids’ parents are willing to pay for. To maximize your earnings, we recommend being a freelance tutor, but you can also earn decent money working for a tutoring company.

Teaching a Foreign Language

¿Habla español? Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Parlez-vous français? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you might be able to earn extra money teaching a foreign language.

Now, this won’t work if you just took a few classes in high school or college — you need to be fluent in the language. But assuming you are, then you can earn good money helping other people learn a language. This is especially true if you can teach a high-demand language such as English, Mandarin, or Spanish.

To get started, we recommend iTalki, which is our favorite place to find online language teachers.

Note: While not required, having some kind of degree or certification in the language you want to teach will definitely help boost your earnings.

Bookkeeping

Think you need to be a CPA to do bookkeeping? Wrong. In fact, you don’t need any formal certifications or degrees to be a bookkeeper. All you need is an understanding of basic bookkeeping and accounting principles. My friend Thomas (this site’s founder) landed a part-time job in high school doing bookkeeping for a small business.

It can also be helpful to know your way around the accounting software that small businesses use – the most popular is Quickbooks, though Wave and Xero are also popular. If you know Quickbooks, though, you can quickly adapt to others. Here’s a very thorough Quickbooks class you can take on Skillshare (this link gets you a 2-week free trial, so you could take other bookkeeping classes there for free during that time).

Selling Handmade Goods on Etsy

Know how to knit? Make pottery? Craft jewelry? If you can make it with your hands, then you can probably sell it on Etsy. Etsy is fairly mainstream now, but in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s an online marketplace for selling handmade and vintage goods. You set your own prices, and Etsy takes a small commission each time you make a sale.

Now, you won’t start making extra money with Etsy overnight. You need to take good photos, write compelling descriptions, and get the word out about your store. But if you’re willing to take the time to do this, then you can certainly build up a business that makes an extra $1,000 per month.

Working as a Virtual Assistant

There are lots of busy professionals who have way more money than time. Therefore, they’re willing to pay to get some of their time back. This is the whole premise behind hiring a virtual assistant (VA) — you do the things that a busy person doesn’t have time to do.

Many people associate virtual assistants with outsourcing, but there’s actually a sizable market for native English-speaking VAs based in U.S. timezones.

If you’re organized, responsive, and don’t mind dealing with stressed out, sometimes demanding professionals, then this can be a great gig. Your job will generally consist of scheduling appointments, booking travel, answering calls and emails, and doing whatever else the person you’re assisting is too busy to do.

To learn how to get started as a VA, check out this course from our friend (and former CIG virtual assistant) Kayla Sloan.

Personal Chef

There are lots of people who need help with cooking. Some people are too busy to cook for themselves, while others are unable to cook due to age or disability. Whatever the case, if you know how to cook, then you can turn that skill into extra money.

According to Career Trend, the average hourly rate for a personal chef is between $35 and $50 per hour. Even if you can just charge $35 per hour, that means you can make $1,000 with just an extra 29 hours of work per month. Plus, you’ll meet lots of interesting people and have an amazing experience to put on your resume.

Note: Be sure to check local laws to make sure you don’t need any special licenses or food-handling certifications to be a personal chef.

Help People Move

If you’ve ever moved to a new house or apartment, you know how much of a pain it is. It’s time-consuming, laborious, and often frustrating. For this reason, most people who can afford it will hire movers.

If you’re organized, careful, and capable of lifting heavy things, then you can start your own moving business today. Having a truck or other large vehicle also helps, though it’s not strictly necessary.

You can easily charge $100 for a small moving job (often more), so this is an awesome gig to earn the extra cash you’re looking for.

Street Performer

I’ll never forget walking down Fremont Street in Las Vegas, seeing the street performers, and witnessing the unbelievable things people will do to make a buck. While I don’t advise that you copy the things the performers on Fremont do (the man dressed as a giant baby still gives me nightmares), street performing can be a solid way to earn extra money.

What you do is entirely up to you. Busking (playing music for donations) is a time-honored approach, but you could also tell fortunes, make art, or just dress up in a weird costume and charge for photos. I’ve never done this myself, but I bet you can definitely make $1,000 a month doing this part-time.

Note: Many cities require you to have a license in order to be a street performer (especially if you’re going to charge money or ask for tips). Check your local laws before you begin. And, obviously, don’t do anything that will get you arrested, fined, or kicked out of school.

Personal Trainer

Most people would like to be in better shape than they are. And when going to the gym won’t cut it, the people who can afford it will often hire a personal trainer. If you know how to get (and stay) in shape, then there’s no reason that personal trainer can’t be you.

According to PayScale, the average hourly rate for a personal trainer is $19. That means you only need to work around 13 hours a week to hit your $1,000 monthly target. As long as you can find enough clients, this is an easy gig to get started with.

Note: We strongly recommend that you get a personal trainer certification if you’re going to do this. Not only will it help you market yourself to potential clients, but it will also make sure that you and your clients stay safe.

DJ-ing

Can you play music off your computer? Then that’s really all you need to be a DJ. Having some more specialized equipment certainly helps, but DJ-ing really isn’t that hard to learn.

You probably won’t end up playing festivals for millions of dollars, but you can certainly earn $1,000 a month DJ-ing weddings or parties on the weekends.

Consulting

This might well be the holy grail of earning extra income. There’s a lot of b.s. in the consulting world, but it can be a perfectly legitimate field. As a consultant, you help businesses (or sometimes individuals) overcome a particular problem. Generally, the goal is to help a business make more money.

If that sounds insanely broad and generic, it is. But that’s the beauty of consulting. If you can help a business make more money, then you can basically charge whatever you want, provided it’s less than the amount of additional money you’ll help the business make.

Here are just a few things you could consult on:

·     Bookkeeping

·     Sales

·     Marketing

·     Website design

·     Website copy

·     Business processes

Junk Removal

People have all kinds of crap in their yards and houses that they need help getting rid of. If you have a strong back and a vehicle that can haul junk, then you can start your own junk removal business.

To get started with this, your best bet is to hit the streets. Walk around local neighborhoods and see if you can spot piles of brush, trash, or other items that people might need help getting rid of. Then, just knock on doors and see if anyone is interested. It can take some persistence, but you can easily charge enough for this to make at least an extra $1,000 in 30 days.

Hourly Jobs

This is a very broad category, but we wanted to include it because sometimes making extra money is as simple as getting a good ole fashioned part-time job.

Assuming you can work 20 hours per week, you just need to find a job that pays at least $12.50 an hour in order to hit the $1,000 per month target. It may not be the sexiest way to make extra money, but it’s proven to work.